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Notes -
Can you share the data you've found? I was just speculating in my post and I could accept that murders were higher in the 1920s than now. Especially because people who were stabbed or shot would be more likely to die without a 911 system and quality medical care.
For the 1920s and 1930s, I was just going off of this which is just the source from the Wikipedia page.Since that data was from the NCHS, I then compared it to the rates for 2021 and 2022 from their dashboard, which showed 2021 and 2022 as being a bit lower than the averages for the 20s and 30s.
The numbers I saw from the first link seemed ballpark with the other ones I could find (The FBI crime data explorer only goes back to 1985 and tends to show lower rates across the board than the NCHS data, but is in the same ballpark and trends in the same direction by year).
Once again, just what I could find quickly off Google, not a rigorous analysis.
And yeah, not a commentary on rates of violence, just in terms of folks going in the ground.
Thanks! That data is so weird. What happened in 1904? The murder rate jumped from 1.3 to 4.9 just 4 years later! I suppose records from those years weren't great.
It looks like in the Post War period, the murder rate has jumped around a lot and we're sort of in the middle right now.
I'll go ahead and say that I was wrong. Although murder does have a significant affect on U.S. life expectancy, the change in the murder rate since 1920 hasn't lowered life spans.
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