Kanye said on Watch the Throne, “Cause ain’t nothin’ on the news but the blues.” Well Kanye, today there is news that is not the blues! Studies show that Americans are safer than they have been in decades. Hit the jump for details.
The past two weeks have been filled with horrifying news. A gunman in Oregon walked into a community college and killed nine people before killing himself. Fights in Arizona and Texas colleges apparently escalated into deadly encounters, with gunmen killing and wounding several people.
But as awful as these recent events are, they don’t represent a growing problem with violence in the United States. In fact, since 1991, the murder rate, along with all violent crime, has plummeted in the US, making this one of the safest periods in American history.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about horrifying acts of gun violence. The US still leads the developed world in both gun deaths and overall homicides — in large part, according to the empirical research, due to the nation’s abundance of guns. There are also signs that murders have ticked up this year in some US cities, although this does not seem to be a nationwide trend and it’s unclear if this will hold in the long term.
But in these moments, it’s comforting to know that we have made some progress. As horrific as mass shootings and school shootings are, Americans are much less likely to be killed in a murder than they have been in generations.
