Why Americans Are a People of Exceptional Violence

Abstract

Among Western countries, the United States is an exceptionally violent place. Serious intentional violence—homicides, other violent gun crimes, mass killings, and police killings of civilians—is dramatically more common. Many American laws—regarding self-defense retreat doctrines, stand-your-ground laws, permissive or minimal regulation of access to handguns and semiautomatic weapons, corporal punishment of children—are much more tolerant of behaviors that inherently present increased risks of violence and victimization. American laws governing sentencing are unique among those of Western countries in both the absolute severity of the punishments they prescribe and allow and the absence of viable legal mechanisms for challenging sentences on the basis that either their absolute severity violates minimum human rights standards or they are disproportionately severe in relation to the seriousness of the wrongdoing for which they are imposed (in either case, a form of unjustifiable state violence).