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View Full Version : Does Ethnic Heterogeneity Make Homicide Worse in the Americas?



Chris
10-08-2017, 12:33 PM
This has come up as a possible factor in level of violence a number of times, ignored by all but a few.

Does Ethnic Heterogeneity Make Homicide Worse in the Americas? (https://mises.org/blog/does-ethnic-heterogeneity-make-homicide-worse-americas)


When gun-control advocates make international comparisons on homicide rates, they generally employ an assumption that places with more stringent gun control laws have lower homicide rates. Unfortunately for them, this only holds up when countries with both high levels of gun control and high homicide rates are excluded from the analysis.

By recognizing the need to exclude most of the world's nations from this analysis, the gun control advocates are of course implicitly admitting they recognize that gun control cannot explain low homicide rates in many areas. The case of Mexico, for example, illustrates quite well that simply imposing gun control does not eliminate problems with homicide.

So, what can explain these differences? Forced to admit that gun control does not explain low homicide rates by itself, even gun control advocates turn to other factors that are essential. Factors such as income, median age of the population, political stability, and other factors are suggested. Even environmental lead levels may be a factor.

Also important is a lack of cultural and ethnic uniformity within a jurisdiction.

This is especially notable when considering the Americas, where nation-states are in most cases frontier states with populations heavily affected by immigration, a history of conflict with indigenous populations, and institutionalized chattel slavery that lasted until the 19th century. The factors are significant through the region, and the United States cannot be held apart in this regard from the Caribbean, Brazil, Colombia, and other states impacted by all these factors.

Importantly, these factors also make the Americas significantly different from Western Europe and other areas — Japan and Korea, for example — where the present situation is marked by much higher levels of cultural uniformity and quite different recent histories and current demographic trends. This by itself, of course, does not explain all social trends and indicators. But anyone analyzing homicide rates in the Americas will tend to notice immediately that crime rates are high in the Americas overall, although legal regimes vary significantly.

The article goes on to review academic literature going back to the 40s long saying this is an important factor in explaining levels of violence.