6 people killed in Texas campsite attack

winnietrey wrote:
Found this interesting, from US crime statistics, in 1960, homicide rate was 5.1 per 100,000. In 2014 it was 4.5 per 100,000. Population has gone from 178 million to 318 million. So while the number of murders has gone up as our population has increased, the percent has gone down, a little bit.

So apparently the good old days were not quite as safe as we would like to remember. I include myself in that way of thinking.

And with the internet, stories that would have stayed local, now are spread all over, so may magnify how we look at this kind of thing. Before it still happened, we just never heard about it, is my guess

Thanks for doing that research. I thought the actual homicide rate had gone down as well, but I didn't look it up. When most of us were kids we wouldn't have been on the Internet talking about a mass killing at a campsite in another state. It would have made the local newspaper, for sure. The local radio would have mentioned it, and maybe the national news on TV would have carried it.

So the average person's opportunity to hear it about it would basically be the 6:00 and 10:0 news, and even then it would have been a very short segment. Even if it caught your attention, you may have talked about it among your neighbors or people at work.

Now, of course, it'll be on Yahoo! within minutes. My wife came in yesterday from work and told me about it. She'd heard about it from a different source. It certainly makes it seem like we live in a more violent world, but it's not necessarily the case.