Homicide In The Unted States

In the article, the author gives definitions for different kinds of homicide. The author also points out that when looking at from a legal standpoint, murder and homicide are two very different crimes. One of the author’s sources says that homicide is “the killing of one human being by another” (cite). He also goes on to say that murder is “the crime of unlawfully killing a person, especially with malice or aforethought.”(cite) This means that homicide can be accidental. If a person got ran over by a car, it would most likely be homicide because they did not intend to do it or plan on doing it. The author also explains that there is not an exact definition for mass murder, spree murder and serial murder. That is because there is very limited research done on these types of murder. He does say that serial murder is characterized by a string of victims murdered over a long period of time.

He begins by saying that many researchers thought that mass killings were very rare in the Unted States before the 1960’s. When they started looking at all the facts they reaized that this was not true. The author than goes on to show a lot of facts about the murders that happened. One of the facts that was presented is that there was a significant increase of murders in the 1920’s and in the 1930’s. The author thinks that this might have taken place because of the agricultural drought that had been going on at the time or because of World War One. The author goes on to say that there was another increase of murders in the 1960’s. Another fact that was given is that in the 1980’s there was a big increase of high body-count murders that took