MAIN IDEA:

Here is the author’s definition of the book:” This book presents a working hypothesis about why adult homicide rates in the United States are so high. The hypothesis is based on tens of thousands of murder cases from the United States and Europe and includes complete or near-complete data from scores of counties across the United States.”

The book reviews the history of homicide not just in the USA but also in European countries from which Americans came.  After reviewing this history, it concludes that while deterrence works, the rate of homicide depends on more important factors:” That rate is also dependent upon forces that are hard to engineer: political stability, the legitimacy of the government, the degree of unity and fellow feeling in the nation, and men’s prospects for achieving a satisfactory place in society.”

Here is a very clear graphic representation supporting the author’s hypothesis:

MY TAKE ON IT:

I completely agree with the author that the rate of homicide could not be treated as some kind of isolated problem, somehow dependent on such factors as the availability of guns or drugs or education. Even the level of deterrence that does minimize homicide rate by removing individuals that commit it after the first offense could not remove it completely. This book’s historical statistical data convincingly supports the author’s hypothesis. So, I would suggest that people who really want to live without homicide should direct their efforts to support political stability and the feeling of belonging to a unified society. It is also necessary to support the belief that it is not just possible but realistic to achieve satisfactory conditions in one’s life. If one adds to it a decent system of early warning and psychiatric care for a small number of mentally disturbed individuals, the rate of homicide could be brought to very close to zero. Correspondingly, all efforts directed at increasing divisions in society, either in the form of antiwhite or antiblack racism or in the form of equalization of results or the form of antisemitism, even if the intention is just to obtain political power, will always lead to the increase in homicide as a side effect of these efforts. Similarly, increased political and economic corruption, which is an inevitable consequence of the growth of a government, would also lead to an increase in homicide, even if the objective is just to steal public money and get control over the lives of other people. One also needs to understand that the idea of law and order seemingly provided by totalitarian societies is just plain wrong because in such societies, crimes such as murders, robberies, and kidnappings are committed by government bureaucrats on the massive scale and just not considered crimes.