March 21, 1995 Contact: Francine Tyler (408/459-2495)

EPIDEMIC HOMICIDE RATE IN UNITED STATES CAUSED BY CULTURE AND GUNS, ACCORDING TO UC SANTA CRUZ PROFESSOR

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--About 25,000 people die by murder or manslaughter each year in the United States. This translates into a homicide rate of 1 murder or manslaughter 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, professor of sociology Dane Archer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, 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. 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).

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. UCSC alumna Patty McDaniel, who earned a B.A. in sociology in 1989, was one of several undergraduates who assisted in the initial stages of the research.

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 12 different scenarios, including a confrontation with an unfaithful spouse, punishing a child, a protest at a factory, and a conflict at work.

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."

A close reading of the 8,000 stories Archer collected led him to surmise that Americans have a cultural predisposition to anticipate 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."

Archer concedes that further research is needed to determine exactly why Americans appear to be inclined to solve problems with violence. In the same study, however, he looked at some popular explanations for America's violent culture in light of experiences had by other nations. These explanations included 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 the cross-cultural scrutiny. 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. He found that New Zealand, England, and other countries boasted a diverse cultural and ethnic population, but didn't suffer from epidemic homicide rates. He found that the enormous, crowded cities of Paris, Tokyo, and London 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.

Recent polls have shown that as many as half of American households own guns, said Archer, citing statistics provided by the federal Department of Justice. And, he noted, guns are involved in nearly 65 percent of all murders or manslaughters in the U.S.

After viewing America's experience compared to that of other nations, Archer concluded that the proliferation of firearms, in combination with the predisposition Americans have toward violence, 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.

Editor's note: For interviews or more information, contact Dane Archer at (408) 459-2555 or send e-mail to .

This release is also available on UC NewsWire, the University of California's electronic news service. To access by modem, dial (209) 244-6971.

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