UC Santa Cruz Review Summer/Fall 1995

Culture of Violence

by Francine Tyler

About 25,000 people die by murder or manslaughter each year in the United States. This translates into a homicide rate of 1 for every 10,000 people--a rate roughly 50 times higher than that of New Zealand, 15 times higher than that of Great Britain, and 12 times higher than that of France.

In a recently published study, UCSC professor of sociology Dane Archer concluded that America's high homicide rate comes from two sources: our culture's predisposition toward violence and the unique access Americans have to guns.

Archer's views of America's predisposition toward violence stem in part from the results of a creative problem-solving test he gave to more than 2,500 secondary-school students in the United States and ten other nations: Australia, Canada, England, France, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and Sweden. Alumna Patty McDaniel, who earned a B.A. in sociology (Stevenson '89), was one of several undergraduates who assisted in the initial stages of the research, which began nearly a decade ago.

The students chosen for the test, ages 16-18, were from similar social and class backgrounds. They were asked to write fictional stories based on characters' reactions to a set of twelve different scenarios, including a confrontation with an unfaithful spouse, the punishment of a child, a protest at a factory, and a conflict at work. In all, Archer evaluated 8,000 stories.

Responses from the American youths were clearly more violent and graphic than those from most of their non-American peers, Archer said. "In the United States, the stories tend to include gothic tales of destruction, where everyone dies in a hail of bullets. In England and other countries, the response may be one slap. In the Swedish stories, there's almost no violence."

"Americans see lethal violence as a not-unlikely outcome when conflicts occur," said Archer. "It may mean that they fear violence, expect violence, or even justify violence as a means of solving conflicts more than do people in other societies."

Much more research is needed to determine why Americans appear to be inclined to solve problems with violence, Archer adds.

In the same study, he examined several other explanations for America's high rate of violent crime, including our nation's history of frontier justice, wars, ethnic diversity, urban crowding, and the prevalence and easy availability of firearms.

Almost none of the explanations for violence survived a cross- cultural comparison conducted as part of the study. For example, Archer found that Australia, New Zealand, and Canada--each frontier societies with violent histories--had some of the lowest rates of homicide in the industrialized world. New Zealand, England, and other countries that boast a diverse cultural and ethnic population don't suffer from epidemic homicide rates. And Paris, Tokyo, and London--enormous, crowded cities--have only a fraction of the homicide rates found in New Orleans, St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.

Where the United States differs from other industrial nations is in its lack of stringent restrictions on guns, Archer found. "Most societies, including the United States, have restrictions on firearms," he said. "However, other industrialized nations draw the line much more narrowly."

For example, European nations allow "birding weapons," he explains, including shotguns, birdshot-type weapons, and weapons used in deer hunting. "They don't allow the relatively unrestricted access to powerful weapons, like semiautomatic rifles, that America does, and they don't allow concealable weapons," he said.

As many as half of American households own guns, said Archer, citing statistics provided by the U.S. Department of Justice. And, he noted, guns are involved in roughly 65 percent of all murders or manslaughters in the U.S.

It's this proliferation of firearms--and the predisposition Americans have toward violence--that best explains the high homicide rate in the United States. "It takes access to firearms and the expectation that lethal violence will be the way problems are solved to generate America's high homicide rate," Archer said.

Below are excerpts from fictional stories written by two of the more than 2,500 students between the ages of 16 and 18 who were asked to respond to a set of scenarios, including one in which a character (William) discovers that his spouse (Mary) is having an affair.

William...reaches under the seat (of his car) and pulls out his service 45 and chambers a round. In the meantime the man steps out of (his own) car and is walking toward William. William sees him coming towards him so he just points it towards the man and pulls the trigger. The shock of the slug to the man's chest was so great it broke all his ribs and put a hole through him that you could stick a baseball through.

--American male

He stays where he is and thinks about the situation, and how he is feeling...Once he realizes his emotions he can start to think rationally on how to control them all three should try to talk about it. If William has prepared himself correctly and well, then no physical trouble should emerge. (Mary and William) can now apologize and make up, thus blocking the problem, or they can separate.

--New Zealand male

The results of the study were published in the New York State Bar Association's journal Law Studies ("American Violence: How High and Why?"; fall 1994).