Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [289]
One striking fact in Wolfgang’s study was how few murderers used guns. Only a third of the victims in his study had been shot, and 38.8 percent had been stabbed. (Women who killed showed a preference for the kitchen knife—some 40 percent of them.) Another 21.8 percent of the victims had been beaten to death.15 But in the later study, the gun emerges clearly as the weapon of choice (65 percent); knives were used in only 21 percent of the instances.16 Is it possible that the population has not gotten more violent in the last thirty years, but simply more heavily armed, and therefore more lethal? A gun is more likely to kill than a knife, or a punch in the jaw. Of course, guns are only part of the story. One can ask, for example, why we are so heavily armed.
The raw figures on homicide, appalling and revealing as they are, raise as many questions as they answer. Domestic violence and stranger violence may be related; they may be two sides of the same coin. The blot of violence has spread over more and more of our social space. People in the late twentieth century have lost a sense of safety, of immunity against sudden, unprovoked attack. They feel themselves surrounded and trapped in a jungle of ruthless, hidden predators. Danger is everywhere, and comes from everywhere. Perhaps the ultimate nightmare is the drive-by shooting—random bullets sprayed from a car, ricocheting off walls and sidewalks, endangering us in our cars, at home, in our yards, putting at risk even children at play.
The rules of the game seem to have changed; indeed, now there were no rules at all, only a black hole, an anarchy in the very heart of the polity. Violence had been a macho sport, and it remained that way; but suddenly the norms had gone haywire; it was like some tremendous boxing match, where the boxers, instead of pounding each other inside the ring, suddenly jump through the ropes and begin mauling and maiming the screaming audience.
I have no solution to offer to the question of origins. Modem violent crime may or may not be the bastard child of frontier violence, or American machismo, or domestic violence, or the like. Even if there is a connection, the connection does not explain very much. Modern violence is different from frontier violence, or historic American violence. There have been plenty of outbursts of violence in the past—the New York draft riots of the Civil War period; vigilantism; race riots. Lynch law was an appalling aspect of our history. Brutality runs through our history. The bloodstained past may have something to do with it; yet our past is much less bloody than the pasts of other countries, which today are lambs to our wolves. The samurai code, unlike the Wild West, does not seem to have left Japanese streets littered with corpses. The French Revolution and the Terror do not seem to make Paris as raw and untamed as New York. Something has to be rotten in the modern state of affairs— some sickness that is peculiarly our own, the child of our period, our customs, our times.
In short, there may be some continuity between the swaggering gun-fighter, the southern duellist, the lynch mob, the young gang members of the past, and the violent criminals of the present; but on the whole we have to look deeper and further. Violent crime is a product, by and large, of male aggression. But that aggression can take many forms, and seek all sorts of outlets, many of them quite benign. Somehow, macho honor and swagger have generalized; they have worked