… then the drug war happened

Diego Valle-Jones, the Izaak Walton of data fishing, looks at the rather lugubrious data on homicides over the last century.  While looking at the age data on killers and their victims (murders do “pick on people their own age” for the most part), he manages to find some good news. Apart from wars — we’ve become less homicidal in each generation.  Overall, our great-grandparents were a much more murderous lot than our grand-parents, who killed each other much more than our parents did, and… while we still have that killer instinct … our children are a more peaceable lot than we are.

In general, that is.

Ever since the end of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War violence in Mexico inched down in fits and starts from a high of about 60 homicides per 100,000 people to its lowest level sometime during the middle of the last decade (there’s some uncertainty about the number of homicides in 2007). Then, the drug war happened and the homicide rate shot straight up.

Actually, as Valle-Jones notes in his highly readable explanation of his angling for data, there was a second factor, that might be as important as the “drug war”… the end of the ban in the United States on the sale of automatic weapons.

Homicide rates in North America had been dropping since the 1990s — and still are dropping in Canada* and the United States.  Again, in 2007…

As always, young people are the majority of victims … and perpetrators… of murder, but the question we should be asking is not “what’s wrong with these kids today?” but what’s wrong with us that made the decisions that permitted a perversion of the natural order of things… who was it that started this drug war, and unleashed those weapons. And to what end?

* Canadians, relax! Yes, your homicide RATE dropped much less than in the U.S. and Mexico, but it was a very low rate to begin with, and — human nature being perverse — the homicide rate will never drop to zero, and a twenty percent drop in a low rate is something to be celebrated. Alas, poor Mexico… we’d seen the murder rate nearly halved and could have been a country where any murder for any reason was an anomaly, if not for … well… you know.