The Murder Problem

Here's something I didn't know. Jordan Peterson says half of all murderers, and half of all murder victims, were drunk at the time of the murder. Statistics bear this out:

Alcohol

According to the NIAAA, as many as 86% of homicide offenders were drinking at or before the crime time.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported convicted murderers in state prisons stated alcohol was a factor in half the murders they committed. It’s higher in murders of intimates (54%) than of acquaintances (50%) or strangers (47%).

Among all homicide victims, 39.9% had a positive BAC including 13.7% with a BAC between 0.01%–0.79% and 26.2% of victims with a BAC ≥0.08%

Income Disparity

We also know that the more income disparity there is in a community, the more murders take place:

Inequality—the gap between a society's richest and poorest—predicts murder rates better than any other variable, according to Martin Daly, a professor emeritus of psychology at McMaster University in Ontario, who has studied this connection for decades. It is more tightly tied to murder than straightforward poverty, for example, or drug abuse. And research conducted for the World Bank finds that both between and within countries, about half the variance in murder rates can be accounted for by looking at the most common measure of inequality, which is known as the Gini coefficient.

Young Black Men

Finally, murder and other violent crimes tend to take place within, not between, demographic groups. So, white men kill other white men, black men kill other black men, Hispanics kill other Hispanics, and so on. Now, although black males only make up around 6% of the population, we also know that half of all murderers and half of all murder victims are black males between the ages of 15 and 30. 

Why is murder so peculiar to black male culture? Well, we can look back at the culture of dueling to get a hint. The duel of honor is peculiar to agrarian societies, where goods (such as cattle or sheep) are easily taken by others and hard to identify once lost. 

While the northern United States was settled primarily by farmers from more established European countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and especially England (particularly from areas around London), the southern United States was settled primarily by herdsmen from the more rural and undomesticated parts of the British Isles. These two occupations — farming and herding — produced cultures with starkly different notions of honor.

This leads to the need for the virtue of honor, the respect for a man's word/deed being good. Loss of honor meant loss of economic activity. If you had no honor, no one would trust you to keep your end of an economic bargain. For the poor, honor was sometimes the only good they had available to use for barter. 

Remnants of the duel can still be seen in the alleys behind middle schools and high schools, where students who have little or no money of their own fight duels of honor to protect the only thing they do have, their reputations. It is no coincidence that the American duel survived in the antebellum south longer than it did in any other part of the nation. That southern honor-based tradition continues today in much of American black culture.

What this means is that murders in the North are more likely to occur during the course of another crime, like burglary, and involve strangers, whereas murders in the South are more likely to arise from a personal conflict, such as a barfight or love triangle. Other studies have shown that only homicides that involve a victim personally known to the perpetrator are elevated in the South compared to other regions of the country. Most interesting of all is the fact that this effect is correlated to the size of a town or city. In medium-size cities (pop. 50k-200k), Southern white males commit murder at a rate of 2 to 1 when compared to the rest of the country; in small cities (pop. 10k-50k) the ratio is 3 to 1; in rural areas it is 4 to 1

So, if we want to cut the murder rate, the demographic that REALLY needs attention are the young, poor black men who live in an honor-based culture, have alcohol or other substance abuse problems, and who live near ostentatiously rich men.

We know from addiction studies that substance abuse is a problem of social integration - when people feel incapable of integrating socially into some kind of community, they turn to drugs. Now we can narrow down the focus to WHY young black men are not being integrated into their communities.

So the problem of violence is not just a problem of the larger community, but specifically of the black community those young men are most familiar with, the specific honor-based community that is REJECTING these young men.

If we want to solve the problem of violent crime, we need to address honor-based culture, the substance abuse problem and income disparities.