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Whereas the South once accepted public lynchings as a community sport, the white racists who still kill Negroes are now increasingly prosecuted and punished. In three decades, the U.S. incidence of murder and robbery has decreased relative to the population by 30%. Says Sociologist Marvin Wolfgang, president of the American Society of Criminology: "Contrary to the rise in public fear, crimes of violence are not significantly increasing."
The Power of Fear
Unfortunately, that very fear has a way of increasing violence. Fearful citizens ignore the victim's cry for help; by shunning parks and other public places, they free muggers to attack isolated pedestrians. The U.S. mind is haunted by wanton multiple murder—16 people killed by a sniper in Austin, eight nurses slain by a demented drifter in Chicago. It is hard to convince the fearful that 80% of U.S. murders (half involve alcohol) are committed by antagonistic relatives or acquaintances, not strangers.
Now, above all, there is white fear of Negro attacks. While the Negro arrest rate for murder is ten times that among whites, most of the violent crimes committed by Negroes are against other Negroes. Of 172 Washington, D.C., murders in a recent two-year period, for example, only twelve were interracial. Yet fear that Negro riots are leading to some ghastly racial holocaust is fueling a vast, scandalously uncontrolled traffic in firearms that has equipped one-half of U.S. homes with 50 million guns, largely for "self-defense." All this is rationalized by virtue of the Second Amendment "right of the people to keep and bear arms." In fact, the right clearly applies to collective defense, as in a state militia. But Congress and most state legislatures refuse to regulate the gun craze, partly in fear of the political power of the 700,000-member National Rifle Association, which often seems to view America as still being Indian country. Only New York requires permits to own household pistols; only eight states require permits to buy them. Guns figure in about 60% of all U.S. murders; since 1900, they have killed 800,000 Americans (excluding wars).
Today's fear of violence is rightly aimed at the terrifying anonymity of the big cities—of which 26, containing less than one-fifth of the U.S. population, account for more than half of all violent crimes. But this fear can be localized: violence is overwhelmingly a ghetto phenomenon; it is the slum dweller who suffers most and cries out for better police protection. In Atlanta, for example, the violent-crime rate in neighborhoods with incomes below $3,000 is eight times that among $9,000-income families.