Summary
Guns and Violence Symposium
The number of homicides has increased mainly due to an increase among youth starting in the 1980s. This increase is due largely to an involvement of youth in the drug market and with guns. There may need to be more stringent enforcement of laws on confiscation of guns from youth. The problem of the illegal drug market could be addressed through more money for treatment and medical means of giving certified addicts drugs. More basically, there is a need to involve in society those who currently see no hope for themselves.See the full content of this document
Extract
Youth violence, guns, and the illicit-drug industry.
I. THE GROWING CONCERN OVER CRIME
Crime has become an issue of increasing importance to the American public. A growing fear of crime seems to pervade the nation and contributes to crime being reported as the nation's "most serious problem."(1) This Article examines some empirical aspects of changing crime patterns in recent years and identifies the nature of these changes more precisely than is possible from a typical press report or political debate. This Article concludes that the predominant change in homicide is attributable to a dramatic growth in youth homicide beginning in the mid-1980s and attributes that growth to the recruitment of young people into illicit drug markets. Because those markets are illegal, the participants must arm themselves for self-protection, and the resulting "arms race" among young people results in a more frequent resorting to guns as a major escalation of the violence that has often characterized encounters among teenage males. A. CHANGING CRIME RATES If one were to ask the American people in 1994 how the crime problem has changed in recent years, most would respond that crime has been growing incessantly worse, especially violent crime. This view is reflected in the "single biggest problem" rating. However prevalent this view may be, it is unfounded. Most Americans would be suprised to see Figure 1a,(2) the graph of the most serious violent crimes, murder and robbery, and Figure lb, the graph of robbery and burglary,(3) over the twenty-two year period from 1972 to 1993.(4) These graphs present a picture of oscillation around a strikingly flat trend. The crime rates have generally remained within a fairly confined range of 200 to 250 per 100,000 population for robbery, and eight to ten per 100,000 for murder. Both the murder and the robbery rates peaked in about 1980, declined through the early 1980s, and then climbed again during the late 1980s with the intensification of the crack epidemic and the "war on drugs." Over this period, there is no statistically significant trend for murder, a slight upward trend for robbery (an annual increase of 3.0 robberies per 10...See the full content of this document
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