I obviously didn't invent the statistics. Amos - they're not "mine". If you do a search you'll find the very same figures from a wide variety of national and international sources. If you don't want to look at the facts I've presented here, then don't - I certainly understand why.

Ira M Leonard, the author of the article "Violence is the American Way" has been a professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University for over 30 years - I'm sure she's neither a dummy nor a disgruntled non-American! And her views are almost exactly the same as those of the Canadian historians and sociologists whose works I've studied, which is why I found the article intriguing. And I'm sure she's not unique in the American scholarly community - she quotes two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter in the article as saying: "What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt contrast with our pretensions to singular national virtue."

Perhaps the real problem is, as Ira Leonard says "with the American population's refusal directly to confront any very ugly reality – which came first I do not know. This is what historians refer to as " mutual causation."

I'm certainly seeing a bit of that right here, right now.

daylia