It was not long ago that we thought it essential for couples to take out marriage licenses before living together and conceiving children. A L S 0 C 0 M E to reexamine the American tradition of violence. The dictates of honor were beloved of antebellum white South Carolinians, but as the old code has been transmuted into the strictures of the street, we have unwittingly created a dangerous anachronism. With modem weaponry in the hands of increasingly younger and more desperate children, the rituals of insults and vengeance are a lethal luxury that we can no longer afford. In certain ways, the rest of the globe has come to look more like America since the worldwide upsurge in crime in the 1960s.
British homes are now more likely to be burgled than American ones.
Cars in France are stolen more frequently than cars in the United States. But in homicide, we retain our longtime lead. In 1991, the most recent year for which figures are available, young men between fifteen and twenty-four in the United States were murdered at a rate of 37.2 per 100,000. That is almost ten times higher than the next closest industrialized country, Italy, and sixty times greater than the homicide rate among the same age group in England. This is not, as some people might suppose, merely a disparity created by the racial composition of our inner cities.