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Comment by MathMonkeyMan | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people in this thread seem to have made up their minds about why more people are killing each other in America.

I read the article and still haven't made up my mind. Thought I'd post a comment for anybody thinking the same.

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If I may throw my speculation into the ring: I assume it’s because people are hurting for money and thus also for necessities like housing, food, and self-determination. My understanding of murder vs homicide was that murder requires intent, but some searching suggests robbery can count as that intent: https://www.danielsonlawfirm.com/murder-manslaughter-homicid...

“A person is guilty of capital murder if the person attempted to commit or did commit a violent crime such as kidnapping, robbery, or arson, and in doing so, the person causes the death of another human being.”

Obviously murder is always bad, and I can’t just forgive murderers even if I feel sorry for them, but I believe the fear and stress of not being able to survive in this world and economy we’ve built can push people over all kinds of edges they would otherwise never approach. I refuse to believe that anybody would want to be a murderer in a hypothetical “perfect” world, even the extreme cases like serial killers. I believe there’s always an emotional hole trying to be filled.

I would think that people of that sort have had more money than ever with the federal unemployment benefits.

Maybe working keeps people from murdering.

Here is a Vox article citing a book that appears to have looked at LA crime data in some depth. Their thesis is the murder rate has little to do with general criminality rates, but rather with gangs and easy access to loaded guns. I am too tone-deaf to American politics to say how much bias should I read in those sources, but seems an interesting perspective. The book was published in 1999, before the hyper-partisan era, so perhaps that's a good sign.

> "Only a minority of Los Angeles homicides grow out of criminal encounters like robbery and rape," they find (there's no reason to believe the pattern would differ in other cities). So even if it could be shown that American robbery and rape rates are across-the-board higher than those in similar countries (which doesn't appear true today), that still wouldn't explain why America has so many more homicides than other countries. Again, Zimring and Hawkins's LA data was revealing.

> "A far greater proportion of Los Angeles homicides grow out of arguments and other social encounters between acquaintances [than robbery or rape]," they find.

> This is where guns enter the story. The mere presence of firearms, according to Zimring and Hawkins, makes a merely tense situation more likely to turn deadly. When a gang member argues with another gang member, or a robber sticks up a liquor store, there's always a risk that the situation can escalate to some kind of violence. But when people have a handheld tool that is specially engineered for killing efficiently, escalation to murder becomes much, much more likely.

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe

https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Is-Not-Problem-Violence/dp/0195...

The robbery rate went down in 2020 along with most other types of violent and non-violent crime. Shootings and homicides were the only types of crime that skyrocketed.

In addition, low wage workers who got laid off made more money than they were making working. And there was a moratorium on evictions.

It might just be as simple as people feel more anonymous and thus more emboldened when everyone is wearing masks.

Causality is such a wasteful discussion point. Most of the time you can simply look in a different, non-causality-focused direction and find enough good ideas to design a better outcome. At the very, very least it's a good idea to go multi-model with causality.

In the simplest terms, there is more murder because there is less trust. Monetary, personal, institutional, future, material: true or not, the perception is enough.

Yeah, but it can be fun to speculate and share information. One interesting theory that I have is that it relates to stimulus checks and Drug crime. A huge amount of money flowed into the economy and it's plausible that The Fallout of drug organizations fighting to capture that influx of cash

That is an interesting theory. Along similar lines, with people debating whether policing has anything to do with it, I thought "mafia thinks it can get its hits in now." Seems outlandish, though.

My best guess is that people cooped up and afraid are more likely to kill. I wonder how it went in other countries. I also wonder whether the distribution of methods of murder (gun, etc.) was much different from 2019 (probably not).

Yeah, I think a lot of these theories can be easily tested by looking at the demographics and details of the crimes. For example how many of the murderer than victims cohabitated or how many were drug related

> My best guess is that people cooped up and afraid are more likely to kill.

People who are cooped up and angry. (I mean, they are afraid, too, but I think the anger is more the cause of murders than the fear.)

What are they angry about? Being cooped up. Still being cooped up. Having their job put on hold, their self-worth threatened, their financial well-being threatened. And they have more time to spend of social media in a filter bubble (from either side), getting more angry about everything else.

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