American killers are getting younger.

• Author: Fox, James Alan
• Position: The Young Desperadoes - Cover Story

"A 14-year-old armed with a gun is far more menacing than a 44-year-old with the same weapon. [The teen] is more willing to pull the trigger--without fully considering the consequences."

BURIED AMIDST the steady stream of stories about teenage girls murdered by their obsessed boyfriends and random shootings on the streets and in the schools, the FBI actually had some good news for a change--the number of homicides in the U.S. for 1992 had fallen six percent over the previous year. Has the tide of violent crime in America finally been stemmed? Unfortunately for the nation, this trend will not last.

First, we caution against putting too much faith into single-year, so-called homicide trends. From year to year, murder rates can fluctuate much like the stock market. What goes up generally comes down, and what goes down generally comes up. The homicide count for 1992, although lower than that for 1991, still was above the murder toll for each of the previous 10 years.

Second, and far more important, the nation appears on the verge of a crime wave that likely will last well into the next century. Such pessimism is more than a case of "Chicken Little." Rather, there are some clear-cut social and demographic trends that make it very probable that today's shocking stories of drive-by shootings and fatal teenage romances will not go away. Even more disturbing is that the upsurge in killings has occurred during a period when violent crime should have been decreasing.

One of the authors (Fox) foretold nearly two decades ago, based on a predictive model developed in 1975 for his book, Forecasting Crime Data, that the rate of violent crime, including homicide, would decline from its 1980 peak until the early 1990s, when it would surge again. The premise then was simple. The explosion in lawlessness in the 1960s and 1970s, when violent crime escalated by double digits nearly every year, was in large part the result of demographics. During this time period, the post-World War II baby boomers --76,000,000 strong--had reached their late adolescence and early 20s, an age when aggressive tendencies are the strongest. As they matured into adulthood during the 1980s, however, they would have outgrown their violent ways, or at least have turned to low-risk crimes of profit. More to the point, the expected decline in the size of the population most prone to violence (teens and young adults) would have translated into a reduced level of crime.

As it happened, crime reports from the early 1980s did reflect a falling rate of violence in most parts of the country. From 1980 to 1985, for instance, the US. homicide rate dropped 23%. Not surprisingly, lawmakers and police chiefs were quick to claim credit for reductions in crime levels. While various programs and policies surely had some impact, the underlying cause largely was demographic.

Then, in 1986, quite unexpectedly, things began to change for the worse. The rate of violence began to rebound, despite continued shrinkage in the population of adolescents and young adults.

The forecasting model had assumed "all else being equal," but, clearly, all else was not equal. Although fewer in number, the new generation--the young and the rootless--was committing violent crimes at an alarming and unprecedented rate.

The statistics are scary. Whereas the rate of homicides by adults 25 and...