Homicide: Explaining America's exceptionalism

American Historical Review

Volumn 111, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 76-94

  Monkkonen, Eric ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FIREARM; GOVERNMENT; HISTORY; HOMICIDE; LEGAL ASPECT; MASCULINITY; MIGRATION; OFFENDER; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL PROBLEM; SOCIOECONOMICS; STATISTICS; UNITED STATES; VICTIM; VIOLENCE;

CRIME VICTIMS; CRIMINALS; FIREARMS; GOVERNMENT; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; HOMICIDE; MASCULINITY; RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY; SOCIAL PROBLEMS; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS; STATISTICS AS TOPIC; UNITED STATES; VIOLENCE;

EID: 33749862712     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.1.76     Document Type: Article

References (130)

1. James A. Sharpe, "The History of Crime in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: A Review of the Field," Social History 7 (May 1982): 187-203.
2. Here I mean personal lethal violence, homicide, not state violence or personal assaults and rapes. These may be related, but there are many reasons to focus on personal lethal violence: for example, it occurs at individual levels, often in intimate settings, and it is a regular object of state attention and a significant activity for the state to suppress (because it defies the state's legitimate monopoly on violence) whether or not the state is itself violent. The contexts and institutions in which homicide is dealt with (family, neighborhood, police, courts, voluntary and religious organizations, and a plethora of medical institutions) have a very different status than does state-sponsored violence. It is in fact the plethora of these disparate formal mechanisms that suggest why there is persistently scattered thinking on differences in violence rates: some of the best research is in psychology, sociology, criminology, political science, economics, public health, and medicine. I have presented some of these ideas elsewhere: see Eric H. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (Los Angeles, 2001)
3. and Monkkonen, "Searching for the Origins of American and European Differences," in Monkkonen, ed., Crime, Justice, History (Columbus, Ohio, 2002), 61-71.
4. For a recent comparative assessment, see A. Reza, James A. Mercy, and E. Krug, "Epidemiology of Violent Deaths in the World," Injury Prevention 7 (June 2001): 104-111.
5. The first, and still important, such effort was Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective (New Haven, Conn., 1984).
6. Canada has persistently had lower rates than the United States, although this statement pertains only to the twentieth century, because good data are lacking for the nineteenth. "The gap between Canadian and US rates has been remarkably persistent over time"; Rosemary Gartner, "Homicide in Canada," in Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., Violence in Canada: Sociopolitical Perspectives (New York, 1995), 209
7. citing John Hagan, "Comparing Crime and Criminalization in Canada and the U.S.A.," Canadian Journal of Sociology 14 (1989): 361-371.
8. See my attempts at measuring in "New Standards for Historical Violence Research," Crime, History, Society 5 (2001): 5-26.
9. The twentieth-century estimate of 1,266,660 is from Douglas Eckberg, e-mail, September 5, 2004; I obtained the nineteenth-century estimate of 135,460 using New York City as my source for the rate of homicide per capita.
10. Russian data are probably unreliable and undercounted; William A. Pridemore, "Measuring Homicide in Russia: A Comparison of Estimates from the Crime and Vital Statistics Reporting Systems," Social Science and Medicine 51 (October 2003): 1343-1354.
11. Lambert A. J. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man, and the Development of His Faculties (Edinburgh, 1842), 6.
12. For a discussion of some of the empirical issues that scholars face, see Roger Lane, ed., "Special Issue: Bloody Murder," Social Science History 25 (Spring 2001): 1-147.
13. This issue includes Elizabeth Dale, "Not Simply Black and White";
14. Jeffrey S. Adler, "'Halting the Slaughter of the Innocents'";
15. Eric Monkkonen, "Estimating the Accuracy of Historic Homicide Rates";
16. Douglas Eckberg, "Stalking the Elusive Homicide";
17. Mary Beth Emmerichs, "Getting Away with Murder?";
18. and Randolph Roth, "Child Murder in New England."
19. Reza, Mercy, and Krug, Injury Prevention, Figure 1.
20. The rates for North Dakota and Louisiana are for 1998, from Kathleen Maguire and Ann L. Pasture, eds., Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1998 (New York, 1999), Table 3.118. The rate for Russia is from http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/seventh_survey/7sc.pdf (accessed November 30, 2005), Office of Drugs and Crime Centre for International Crime Prevention, Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998-2000; the figure of 18/100,000 is repeated in media reports as the figure for Moscow as well.
21. See http://www.isp.state.id.us/identification/ucr/documents/ BK02CrimeInIdaho.pdf (accessed November 20, 2005) for the sole homicide in Moscow, Idaho; the city had no murders the year before, bringing the two-year average to 2.25.
22. Nabi Abdullaev, "Moscow Dies by the Knife and Rope," St. Petersburg Times, February 19, 2002.
23. See several theoretical articles in Crime, History & Societies 5 (2001):
24. Randolph Roth, "Homicide in Early Modern England, 1549-1800: The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis," 33-67;
25. Helmut Thomas, "Explaining Long Term Trends in Violent Crime," 68-86;
26. Pieter Spierenburg, "Violence and the Civilizing Process: Does It Work?" 87-105. The scholarship on crime and homicide for each major European nation is deep and superb, and my citations throughout this article are simply meant to sample important recent essays that interested readers would find stimulating.
27. Ted Robert Gurr, "Historical Trends in Violent Crime: Europe and the United States," in Gurr, ed., Violence in America, vol. 1: The History of Crime (Newbury Park, Calif., 1989), 21-54;
28. Manuel Eisner, "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime," Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 30 (2003): 83-142. Note that each of the data points in the Eisner and Gurr articles represents a major and mainly different research effort.
29. Waldo L. Cook, "Murders in Massachusetts," Publications of the American Statistical Association 3 (September 1893): 357-378.
30. Pre-1850 Mexican Los Angeles had a rate of more than 50 per 100,000; the level actually increased in early American Los Angeles, but by the later nineteenth century it had fallen to high but no longer bizarre levels. From the national point of view, these are anecdotes, as the city was tiny - barely a village in mid-century. Still, it was an unwise person who went out late at night then. Eric H. Monkkonen, "Homicide in Los Angeles, 1827-2002," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36 (2005): 167-183
31. and Monkkonen, "Western Homicide: The Case of Los Angeles, 1830-1870," Pacific Historical Review 74 (2005): 603-617.
32. Prior to the creation by the FBI of the Uniform Crime Reports, there were no national crime data. Douglas Eckberg has produced an estimate of annual U.S. homicide rates using public health and other data sources for the period 1900-1930. "Estimates of Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Homicide Rates: An Econometric Forecasting Approach, "Demography 32 (1995): 1-16.
33. For the nineteenth century, there is only one complete American data series for homicide, in Monkkonen, Murder in New York City.
34. Several scholars are at work on other data sources, but it will take several more years to obtain accurate estimates of homicide rates in the nineteenth-century United States. Rates for Maryland are calculated from James D. Rice, "Crime and Punishment in Frederick County and Maryland, 1748-1873: A Study in Culture, Society, and Law" (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1994), 34, 100. These rates are probably an underestimate, as the homicide count is from court records, which contain only those cases in which there was an arrest and prosecution.
35. Douglas Eckberg, "Introduction," in Horace Redfield, Homicide, North and South: Being a Comparative View of Crime against the Person in Several Parts of the United States (1880; repr., Columbus, Ohio, 2000), xxiii.
36. Cook, "Murders in Massachusetts," 377.
37. can find no other publications by Cook (he mentions the predecessor of this article in the Springfield [Mass.] Republican newspaper) other than an article in the Nation on Sacco and Vanzetti. The Publications began in 1888 and soon had its first crime note, Roland P. Falkner, "Note on the Statistics of Crime," 2 (March 1891): 138-139.
38. cite this article because of its placement in an important fledgling scholarly journal. On Cook's substantive point, work on two rural Ohio counties for the nineteenth century by Kenneth Wheeler and Randolph Roth confirms the impact of urban exodus and rising homicide rates: Wheeler, "Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Ohio," Journal of Social History 31 (1997): 407-418
39. and Roth, personal communication.
40. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public (Chicago, 1987).
41. H. C. Brearly, Homicide in the United States (1932; repr., Montclair, N.J., 1969).
42. Quoted by Ira M. Leonard and Christopher C. Leonard, "The Historiography of American Violence," Homicide Studies 7 (May 2003): 99-153, 109;
43. Richard M. Brown, "Overview of Violence in America," in Ronald Gottesman, editor in chief, and Richard Maxwell Brown, consulting editor, Violence in America: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1999), 2.
44. The pioneering studies include Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-century England," Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (July 1976): 297-320;
45. Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1979);
46. James Buchanan Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif., 1977); and
47. Carl I. Hammer, Jr., "Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town: Fourteenth-Century Oxford," Past and Present, no. 78 (February 1978): 3-23.
48. This essay is about personal lethal violence-murder-not about state or group violence. Georg Simmel in Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (1950; repr., New York, 1964), 409-424. See the discussion at http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/250m703.htm, Section f (accessed November 30, 2005).
49. Manuel Eisner, "Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence: The Long-Term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective," British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001): 618-638;
50. Helmut Thome, "Explaining Long Term Trends in Violent Crime," Crime, History & Societies 5 (2001): 69-86.
51. For a critique of the Elias thesis, see Gerd Schwerhoff, "Criminalized Violence and the Process of Civilization - A Reappraisal," Crime, History & Societies, ibid. 6 (2002): 103-126
52. and Pieter Spierenburg, "Theorizing in Jurassic Park: A Reply to Gerd Schwerhoff," Crime, History & Societies, ibid., 127-128.
53. Spierenburg simply states: "in America as a whole the process of the monopolization of violence [by the state] remained a partial one in comparison with Europe"; "Masculinity, Violence, and Honor: An Introduction," in Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Columbus, Ohio, 1998), 25.
54. Daniele Boschi, "Homicide and Knife Fighting in Rome, 1845-1914," in Spierenburg, Men and Violence, 151. Rome had a very high homicide rate in the mid-nineteenth century, around 18 per 100,000;
55. Daniele Boschi, Men and Violence, ibid., 132-133.
56. Original quotation, "American homicides are a third world phenomenon occurring in a first world nation," from Franklin Zimering and Gordon Hawkins, Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America (New York, 1997), 52.
57. Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000). An earlier article by Bellesiles contained the nugget of the book and began to draw increased attention to his assertions;
58. see Bellesiles, "The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865, "Journal of American History 83 (September 1996): 425-455.
59. For a critique of his book, see the articles in "Forum: Historians and Guns," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 59 (January 2002)
60. in particular Randolph Roth, "Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence," 223-240.
61. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, 35.
62. Robert R. Dykstra, "Field Notes: Overdosing on Dodge City," Western Historical Quarterly 27 (Winter 1996): 505-514, critiques the notion of a uniquely American frontier culture of violence.
63. European gun ownership rates range from 4 percent in England to 32 percent in Norway and 50 percent in Finland. See "Violence] P[olicy] C[center] Backgrounder on Guns and France in Wake of Mass Handgun Shooting in Nanterre, France [2002]," at http://www.vpc.org/press/0203france.htm (accessed November 21, 2005).
64. See also E. G. Krug, K. E. Powell, and L. L. Dahlberg, "Firearm-Related Deaths in the United States and 35 Other High- and Upper-Income Countries," International Journal of Epidemiology 27 (1998): 214-221;
65. Martin Kilias, "International Correlations between Gun Ownership and Rates of Homicide and Suicide," Canadian Medical Association Journal 148 (1993): 1721-1725;
66. and David J. Bordua, "Firearms Ownership and Violent Crime: A Comparison of Illinois Counties," in James M. Byrne and Robert J. Sampson, eds., The Social Ecology of Crime (New York, 1986), 156-188.
67. Jay P. Altmayer, American Presentation Swords: A Study of the Design and Development of Presentation Swords in the United States from Post Revolutionary Times until after the Close of the Spanish American War, intro. by Harold L. Peterson (Mobile, Ala., 1958).
68. Thomas Keneally, American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (New York. 2002), 171.
69. Boschi shows that Rome had very high homicide rates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, achieved almost entirely with knives. "Homicide and Knife Fighting," 128-158.
70. I hesitate to push this question further here. Most historians are uncomfortable with insights from evolutionary biology. I find such insights powerful, for example, in explaining why most murderers and their victims in most places are men. On the other hand, huge regional variations in defining masculine aggressiveness seem to account for higher or lower rates of violence; Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, Colo., 1996), offer a provocative statement of regional North/South differences in aggression that examines both behavior and body chemistry.
71. On gender and violence, see Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York, 1988).
72. My thinking has been influenced by Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York, 1984);
73. Spierenburg, Men and Violence;
74. Deborah Blum, Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences between Men and Women (New York, 1997);
75. and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York, 1999); the literature expands constantly. I am indebted to the work of the Crime History Network of the Social Science History Association, which has conducted floating seminars for the past twenty-five years.
76. Thomas W. Gallant, "Honor, Masculinity, and Ritual Knife Fighting in Nineteenth-Century Greece," AHR 105, no. 2 (April 2000): 359-382;
77. Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (New York, 2003).
78. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998).
79. See George Cooper, Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice in Old New York (New York, 1994), for the acquittal of a murderer who had stalked his socially prominent victim for weeks, and shot him in front of witnesses in a newspaper office; both men were middle-class, but masculinity and honor were at stake.
80. See Roger Lane, Murder in America: A History (Columbus, Ohio, 1997), esp. 143-144.
81. Keneally details Sickles's rise to generalship, controversial role, and serious injury at Gettysburg in American Scoundrel, chaps. 6-7.
82. Comparable accounts of homicides, arrests, and prosecutions are still hard to come by. In the Netherlands today, about 80 percent of murder offenders are caught and prosecuted. Paul Smit, WODC Research & Documentation Center, Ministry of Justice, Netherlands, personal communication, June 6, 2003. In the United States, about 65 percent face arrest, and presumably fewer are prosecuted, although Maguire and Pastore, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1998, gives a 68 percent conviction rate for 1997, calculated from pp. 289, 431.
83. V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994), 7, 618.
84. Gatrell cites P. Jenkins, "From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England," Criminal Justice History 7 (1986): 52.
85. I use 20 million for the mean English population and 10 million for the United States. These estimates are crude. There is controversy about the English homicide data; Howard Taylor claims that they are unrealistically regular, year to year, and are therefore suspect: "The Politics of the Rising Crime Statistics of England and Wales, 1914-1960," Crime, History and Societies 1 (1998): 5-28.
86. Note that the discovery of regularity that so bothers Taylor caused Quetelet to conceptualize a social structure. See also Taylor, "Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s," Economic History Review 51 (August 1998): 569ff.
87. Data on American executions are from M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, "Executions in the United States, 1608-1991: The Espy File" (computer database), 3rd ICPSR ed., comp. John Ortiz Smykla, produced and distributed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994.
88. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775 (Oxford, 1987).
89. r2 = -.06; I should note that an assiduous effort at data analysis might support (or reject) claims of a relationship between executions and murders, but the basic data make the effort not seem worthwhile. Jen Joynt and Carrie Shuchart, "Mortal Justice," The Atlantic Monthly 291 (March 2003): 41.
90. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, 167.
91. In an article in the Los Angeles Times on July 28, 2003, "South L.A. Killings Get Less Police Attention Than Others," Jill Leovy and Doug Smith showed that over a period of twelve years, there had been 2,000 uncleared (unsolved) homicides in South Los Angeles-covering most city blocks in the area.
92. David Garland, "Capital Punishment and American Culture," Punishment & Society 1 (2005): 347-376.
93. Home Office, Criminal Statistics for England and Wales, 2000 (London, 2001), 88. No figures for arrests only are given. Found at http://www.archive. official-documents.co.uk/document/cm53/5312/ cm5312.htm (accessed November 21, 2005).
94. Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 163.
95. Douglas L. Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," Journal of Social History 8 (Spring 1975): 28-54;
96. Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001).
97. Lane, Violent Death in the City, notes the role of mobile young men in violence.
98. See Claude Fischer, "Ever-More Rooted Americans," "A Century of Difference" Working Paper, The Survey Research Center, University of California, Berkeley (draft, November 2000), http://ucdata. berkeley.edu/rsfcensus/ papers/mobilitynov2000.pdf (accessed November 30, 2005);
99. Fischer, "Ever-More Rooted Americans," City & Community 1 (June 2002): 175-195;
100. Monkkonen, "Residential Mobility in England and the United States, 1850-1900," in Themes in British and American History: A Comparative Approach, c. 1760-1970 (Milton Keynes, 1985), 77-83, explores the mobility issues.
101. A more sophisticated look at factors mitigating mobility is Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy," Science 277 (August 15, 1997): 918-924.
102. Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York, 1993), 193-210, discusses other aspects of mobility and crime.
103. For a synthesis, see Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, "Migration and the Social Order in Erie County, New York: 1855," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (Spring 1978): 669-701.
104. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged.
105. Monkkonen, "The Puzzle of Murder Statistics: A Search for Cause and Effect," in Monkkonen, Crime, Justice, History, 72-74.
106. Lane found that "transient bachelors" in Philadelphia were the most likely to kill or be killed; Violent Death in the City, 83. Mobility can have seemingly opposite consequences - the least able people may be left behind, or the least able may depart.
107. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York, 1917)
108. and An American Tragedy (New York, 1925).
109. Frederic Milton Thrasher, The Gang (Chicago, 1927);
110. see also Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, Social Factors in Juvenile Delinquency: Report on the Causes of Crime (Washington, D.C., 1931), vol. 11. The Chicago Area Project has existed for more than seventy years; see http://www.chicagoareaproject.org/aboutus.htm (accessed November 30, 2005).
111. See also Steven Schlossman and Michael Sedlak, "The Chicago Area Project Revisited," Crime and Delinquency 29 (1983): 398-462.
112. Robert J. Bursik, Jr., "Social Disorganization and Theories of Crime and Delinquency: Problems and Prospects," Criminology 26 (1988): 519-551;
113. "Rethinking the Chicago School of Criminology in a New Era of Immigration," paper presented to the NCOVR Workshop "Beyond Racial Dichotomies of Violence: Immigrants, Ethnicity and Race," November 2003, University of California, Los Angeles.
114. Most historians and political scientists have focused on understanding the growth of the complex of bureaucracies that made up the American state. See, for example, Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
115. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982);
116. Monkkonen, The Local State: The Political Economy of the City (Stanford, Calif., 1995).
117. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994 (Washington, D.C., 1994), 319, Tables 493-494.
118. Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, "The Social Distribution of Femicide in Urban Canada, 1921-1988," Law and Society Review 25 (1991): 287-312.
119. Understanding differences in federal systems is far beyond the scope of this article-and probably beyond my abilities as well. For a study that shows the differences that federal structures can make, see Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 2004). "Our claim that the nature of federalism influences the dynamics and stability of a party system differs from previous party system theories that stress the significance of social cleavages, electoral laws, and other constitutional features" (3). I wish to thank Karren Orren for this citation.
120. http://www.fbi.gov/aboutus/faqs/faqsone.htm (accessed November 30, 2005);
121. http://www.nyc.gov/ html/nypd/html/misc/pdfaq2.html#41 (accessed November 30, 2005);
122. source for executions: http:// www.religioustolerance.org/execut3. htm#stats (accessed November 30, 2005).
123. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
124. Redfield, Homicide, North and South, 16-17;
125. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; Lane, Murder in America, 350-351.
126. Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York, 1996).
127. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, 167; tolerance knits the mobility and federalism explanations as well.
128. Cooper, Lost Love. As William F. Kuntz observed for capital juries in the period 1830-1880, "New Yorkers were extremely reluctant to execute those convicted of capital offenses."
129. William Francis Kuntz II, Criminal Sentencing in Three Nineteenth-Century Cities: Social History of Punishment in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1830-1880 (New York, 1988), 73.
130. In the United States, there are far fewer scholars at work on the tedious business of reconstructing rates, but the project initiated at Ohio State University by Randolph Roth, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Douglas Eckberg (www.sociology.ohio-state.edu/cjrc/hvd, accessed November 30, 2005) promises not only to help in providing cumulative and consistent historic homicide data, but also to stimulate new research projects.