Editorials & Other Articles

For all the attention understandably paid to mass shootings, random killings, assassinations, murders for hire and other headline-grabbers, homicides in the U.S. are mostly prosaic tragedies involving men with guns, especially younger Black men, getting into fights with one another.

"Even I am a little dubious of FBI estimates showing violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) at half-century lows relative to population and property crime possibly lower than it’s ever been. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual Crime Victimization Surveys show marked declines over the past two decades in the share of crimes that respondents say they reported to police, and those are the only crimes the FBI knows about; it even changed the name of its annual release from “Crime in the Nation” to “Reported Crimes in the Nation” this year to reflect this. "