Welcome to the Bloody ’20s

T he bloody year of 1968 was an extraordinarily violent one in the United States, with the murder rate increasing almost 13 percent year-over-year, the largest such increase that had been recorded before or since.

Until now.

In 2020, murders were up 21 percent, according to FBI data. Data from the 60 largest U.S. cities collated by the Intercept found murders up 36 percent in those cities, almost three times the previously unmatched frenzy of 1968.

The homicidal wave rolled through the big cities (New York City saw a nearly 50 percent bump in its murder count), through small towns (according to the Intercept, towns with fewer than 10,000 residents saw a slightly larger increase than cities with more than 1 million residents), and through medium-sized cities, including my hometown of Lubbock, Texas, which had more than twice as many homicides in 2020 as it had in 2019 and where one out of every 100 residents is a victim of a violent crime in a typical year.

Inevitably, the usual political ghouls are opportunistically trying to recruit all these dead Americans into their political campaigns and their just-so narratives.

Sometimes, that means trying to blame the rampage on guns. But there is not much reason to do so. Gun sales have indeed been very high in the past year, partly because of an instinct to arm up during times of social and economic disruption, and partly because those of us not ensorcelled by QAnon fairy-tales could see long before November that Donald Trump was likely to lose the presidential election and that he might take the Republicans’ Senate majority down with him, and that he would be replaced by a Democrat hostile to the Second Amendment. Even though the scary-looking black rifles that haunt the dreams of Democrats are used in only a vanishingly small share of murders (statistically, you are more likely to be clubbed to death or stabbed than to be shot by someone wielding an AR-style rifle, or, indeed, any rifle of any sort), they are the first weapons gun-grabbers are disposed to go after. Call it panic buying or call it prudence, elections have the power to move gun markets.

But more gun ownership does not mean more violent crime. There is very little correlation between those variables. And part of that is the fact that so many U.S. murders involve no firearms at all: Typically, firearms are involved in about two-thirds of U.S. murders, with the other third caused by stabbings, beatings, intentional drownings, poisonings, etc. Americans are much more likely to be shot to death than are Swiss, Japanese, or Emiratis, but they also are more likely to be stabbed to death, beaten to death, killed with an ax, etc. The variable that seems to be the best indicator is not the presence of firearms but the presence of Americans.

There is not much reason to believe that the COVID-19 lockdowns or the anti-police protests are a main cause of the higher murder rate. The murder rate already was up year-over-year in many communities before the lockdowns began, and murder rates already were elevated before the protests. In New York, the increase grew more dramatic as the year went on, as was the case in some other cities; but in places such as Austin and Minneapolis, the most dramatic increase came in the first quarter. Though many of the protests were themselves violent and hence contributed to the gross increase in violent crime, there is little evidence linking increases in murder rates to, say, police redeployments associated with the protests and riots. Complaints about the atmosphere of lawlessness in places such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis are not without basis, and lawlessness can be contagious, but these complaints are for the most part vague and unsupported by rigorous analysis. They are a matter of mood rather than a matter of metrics.

Of course all of these elements interact with each other in ways that are easy to imagine but difficult to really pin down: The lockdowns increased the population of idle young men with circumscribed social lives, which is generally dangerous; the lockdowns coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption, which is very strongly linked to domestic violence; the lead-up to the election saw a significant increase in first-time gun ownership and mirror-image apocalyptic political tendencies on either side of the political spectrum; the riots produced both an atmosphere of lawlessness and an exaggerated sense of vulnerability; the coronavirus epidemic stimulated the End Times sensibility that is always present, if just beneath the surface, in American culture.

Much of the summer was taken up by irresponsible right-wing media figures warning of a second civil war and irresponsible left-wing activists endeavoring to make the case for the irresponsible right-wingers. But our poisonous political culture is the effect, not the cause, of our broader social and moral dysfunction. The uptick in violence is simply a dramatic and deadly manifestation of our underlying spiritual and intellectual chaos.

Nothing happened to us in 2020. We happened.