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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study
May 7, 2013, 12:46 p.m.
Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of
the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two
new studies of government data show.
Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe
gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew
Research Center.
In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half.
Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in
violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply
during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the
millennium.
The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun
crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most
common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993
and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out
with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.
The bureau also looked into non-fatal violent crimes. Few victims of such
crimes -- less than 1% -- reported using a firearm to defend themselves.
Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed
said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew,
which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said
it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.
It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such
violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo.,
were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew
found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and
morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on
local television news.
“It’s hard to know what’s going on there,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior
writer at the Pew Research Center. Women, people of color and the elderly
were more likely to believe that gun crime was up than men, younger adults
or white people. The center plans to examine crime issues more closely later
this year.
Though violence has dropped, the United States still has a higher murder
rate than most other developed countries, though not the highest in the
world, the Pew study noted. A Swiss research group, the Small Arms Survey,
says that the U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country.
Experts debate why overall crime has fallen, attributing the drop to all
manner of causes, such as the withering of the crack cocaine market and
surging incarceration rates.
Some researchers have even linked dropping crime to reduced lead in gasoline
, pointing out that lead can cause increased aggression and impulsive
behavior in exposed children.
The victims of gun killings are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately
black, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics and Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention data. Compared with other parts of the country, the
South had the highest rates of gun violence, including both murders and
other violent gun crimes. |
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