UF Professor: America Moves In Wrong Direction In Dealing With Murder

July 24, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Americans do not have to live with a record-high murder rate that makes it the exception to a worldwide pattern, says a University of Florida researcher.

Typically, the greater a country’s economic development, the lower its homicide rate, but the United States – the wealthiest nation on earth – has far more murders in any of its large cities than do entire European countries, said Leonard Beeghley, a UF sociologist.

“The United States is unlike other nations because the first answer to a medical problem is often surgery, the first answer to a psychological problem is often Prozac, and the first answer to an interpersonal problem is often violence and it is often lethal,” he said.

In his new book “Homicide,” published this month by Rowman and Littlefield, Beeghley shows that America’s high homicide rate reflects the combined impacts of the greater availability of guns, racial discrimination, exposure to violence and economic inequality, as well as the expansion of illegal drug markets.

Other nations have tried to reduce the impact of these factors on social life, such as by decriminalizing possession of small amounts of certain drugs, treating addiction as a public health problem and reducing the level of economic inequality, Beeghley said. By contrast, the United States is moving in the opposite direction – with predictable results, he said.

This country has the greatest income inequality of any Western nation, and tax-law changes over the last 25 years has made it the worst since the Depression era, he said. “Inequality generates alienation, despair and pent-up aggression that finds expression in frequent interpersonal conflicts,” he said.

In his book, Beeghley points to studies showing higher homicide rates among blacks in racially segregated neighborhoods where there are limited education and job opportunities as one reason the murder rate is so high.

“People who have few choices develop a lot of free-floating anger, and their disputes sometimes become violent with lethal results,” he said. “Since they offer economic opportunity, it’s no accident that illegal drug markets flourish in segregated inner-city areas.”

Such markets remain exceedingly violent because the distribution and sale of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin occur outside the law, he said.

“By contrast, if a distributor of Coors beer had a dispute with a distributor of Budweiser over sales territory or products, it is unlikely they would resort to a shootout,” he said. “They would meet in court rather than the street.”

Regulating the sale of drugs as is now done with alcohol, cigarettes – and even guns – would under price and destroy the illegal market, resulting in fewer deaths due to drug impurities, less inner-city violence, and profits remaining in the country and being taxed, Beeghley said. Since the Dutch began doing this over the last few years teen marijuana use has fallen to about half the U.S. rate, he said.

The widespread availability of guns also makes the United States unique among Western societies, Beeghley said. Comparative analyses across nations consistently show the higher the proportion of households with guns, the higher the homicide rate, he said.

Fewer Americans would be murdered if a public-safety campaign were initiated for guns as it was for automobiles during the last generation, Beeghley said.

“When the government sought to make automobiles safer beginning in the 1960s, the installation and use of seat belts became controversial,” he said. “Yet it’s one important reason why auto fatalities have declined over the last few decades.”

One of the biggest problems occurs when someone other than the owner uses a gun, he said.

Many of these accidents could be prevented if guns were redesigned to include fingerprint-reading technology and other personal identification technologies, he said.

Other lifesaving strategies might include placing a limit on the number of guns that can be purchased at any one time, increasing police efforts to remove guns from the streets in violent neighborhoods, and restricting the manufacture of guns made of poor-quality materials and prone to malfunction, such as the infamous Saturday night special, he said.

In all, more Americans have been homicide victims since 1950 than were killed on the battlefield in all wars in which the United States has participated: 789,000 compared with 651,000, he said.

Steven Messner, a sociologist at the University of Albany, State University of New York, who is an expert on criminal homicide and co-author of the book “Crime and the American Dream,” says Beeghley’s book provides an “impressive” sociological understanding of murder.

“Beeghley skillfully synthesizes prior work in the field and advances creative, original arguments about the social structural origins of lethal violence in the U.S,” Messner said.