-Caveat Lector- Why Americans kill http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/story.html?in_review_id=399025&in _review_text_id=346380 This was in Falls River, Massachusetts, in 1892. It would be an unlikely murder in AD 2001. Today's Americans seldom have an axe in the shed; their barbecue kindling comes ready-chopped from the shopping mall. But if they don't kill one way, they kill another. At the same mall they'll find a shop that sells handguns. For as long as records go back, the United States murder rate has soared far above England's. In the Nineties, the murder rate in New York alone was 10 times that for the whole of England. A gun caused four out of every five of those deaths. Guns caused less than one English murder in 10. Why do Americans kill? It's a recurrent puzzle within so seemingly civilised a society. The highly-respected crime historian, Professor Eric H Monkkonen, has carried out an exhaustive and enlightening new study, Murder In New York City (University of California Press, L19.95). He delves back across two centuries of homicide in the United States - and not only in New York - in his quest for an answer. The American way of life is also the American way of death. The black power activist, H Rap Brown, said that violence "is as American as cherry pie". Oklahoma City bomber and white supremacist Timothy McVeigh would probably have agreed. Four American politicians, from Andrew Johnson to Lyndon B Johnson, became president only because their predecessors - from Abraham Lincoln to John F Kennedy - were assassinated. The sole British prime minister to be murdered was Spencer Percival, way back in 1812. In the early murder history of the US, death usually came by knife, a club, even a rock. Handguns at that stage were pretty useless. Magazines advertised them alongside other "fancy goods," such as ointments to make your moustache grow or mail-order shirts. Revolvers small enough to be concealed were only "baubles for urban middle-class men". Revolvers with firepower weighed several pounds, and were ludicrously inaccurate. Westerns tell a deeply off-target tale. You'd never hit anyone from the roof of the local saloon with a revolver. To be sure to kill a man, you had to get within about three feet. But fashions and implements changed. As Eric Monkkonen says, the jack-knife went the way of the bowler hat. Which left guns. Samuel Colt was a wonderful salesman. He made his name as a demonstrator of laughing gas at travelling fairs, and displayed his famous revolver at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851. He brought handguns into mass production, but they remained highly erratic. The most lethal move, as Professor Monkkonen's figures show, was the mass production of semi-automatics in America after the Second World War. These increased your chances of a successful murder simply because they sprayed out so many more bullets. In spite of its ferocious reputation, New York lagged behind the rest of the US for murder cases until 1958 - though both rates were sky-high by British standards. In Leonard Bernstein's Fifties musical, West Side Story, the city's teenage gangs "could be seen as romantic and cute". But this was the last moment anyone could cling to this perception. The homicide rate thereafter went into overdrive. A murderer's motive is almost always a "passion to control others", Monkkonen argues. Money isn't as strong a motive as you might expect, although it has risen to being a major factor in 17 per cent of American homicides, from less than four per cent. From the Sixties, New York became the site of a constant series of skirmishes for control over drug territories. The newly marketed semi-automatics were there to jack up the death toll. However, America's high murder rate compared to western Europe goes back at least 200 years, well before anyone cooked crack-cocaine. Given the pork-barrel system of local politics, men even killed to acquire the jobs that would bring them the power of patronage and the benefits of bribery. In the days of New York's Tammany Hall - a corrupt Democratic Party machine - John McKenna and Thomas Marra were murdered one polling-day morning. They were killed by Richard Croker or by his party gang. Croker, a future mayor of New York, was then a lowly, elected coroner who thought his political spoils were under threat from his rivals. He was indicted, but the charge was dismissed. "Where did the United States go wrong?" Monkkonen asks. Even Canada, just across the 49th Parallel, evolved less murderously. Religious differences, as those over abortion now, can drive American passions as high as racial ones. Murder flourishes like an unstoppable weed, or an epidemic. Partly, Monkkonen argues, it is an inheritance of the way the slave-owning South ran its business. To enforce slavery depended on a constant willingness to use personal violence. Courts and legislatures were kept weak. But this was only a tougher version of the way the early US ran the whole of its business. At every level, judicial systems were feeble and decentralised. Debates about liberty delayed the introduction of police forces, which are still fragmented. The State remains weak. Into this weak vessel was poured an unending stream of new migrants. First, Irish and Germans; then Italians, Poles and Jews; then Mexicans and Cubans; and onward to Russians, Chinese and Koreans. Meanwhile, black refugees from rural poverty poured into the northern cities. This all meant that a lot of men, and especially young men, were on the loose. The only English city ever to match the New York murder level was Liverpool at the height of the 19th century Irish migration into Merseyside. Monkkonen argues that killers are people - almost always men - "with unstructured liberty". The victims are almost always men, too. Ceaseless migrations give the US its enduring economic strength. People who want to get on in the world, by one device or another, pour in at the bottom end of the labour market. The social downside is that what Eric Monkkonen calls "the civilising process" has been constantly delayed, by comparison with western Europe; in other words, the process of learning how to settle differences by gentler means than murder. Pessimistically, he says that "the American heritage may take centuries to correct". Gun control could narrow the American-European difference, but wouldn't end it. Deprived of the gun, American men would turn to some other weapon, as in the past. For real change, "if men take charge of anything, it must be of the notion that real men don't kill, that self-respect means shrugging off an insult". This is a message worth pinning up in Harlesden and Brixton as well as in New York. But Prof Monkkonen wouldn't be an American if he couldn't also see room for optimism. Recently, the New York homicide rate has dropped. He reckons it may be the long-term outcome of prevention programmes like the Head Start education schemes, plus the more brutal impact of programmes of incarceration. Looking back at America's bloodstained history, prevention and punishment aren't opposites, he argues. To get crime down, you need both. Paul Barker is Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Community Studies C Associated Newspapers Ltd., 11 June 2001 --- FYI: This mail sent by Mario Profaca is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). 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