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Guns, Murder, and Plausibility: Can Historians Trust the LaFree Hypothesis?

The most astonishing item in Randolph Roth’s massive new book, American Homicide, is not encountered until pages 450–51. Here the reader comes across figures 9.4 and 9.5, the author’s usefully tabulated versions of criminologist Gary LaFree’s discovery about murder in the United States. Since 1958, the national homicide rate (killings per 100,000 of population) has risen and fallen in coordination with the percentages of Americans who (1) “trust the government to do what is right” and (2) believe that “quite a few people running the government are crooked.” In sum, murder declines when government is seen as honest, and it rises when government is deemed dishonest (LaFree 1998, 100–104). Explaining this association of variables requires a big leap of the imagination. LaFree hypothesizes that the homicidemistrust correlation is shorthand for a much larger phenomenon: Americans’ rising and falling faith not only in the legitimacy of the government and the political system, but also in the legitimacy of the prevailing economic order and the traditionally structured family. These three societal elements—economic system, political system, and family—are key “institutions,” which LaFree defines as “the patterned, mutually shared ways that people develop for living together” (71). When institutional trust is healthy, people are more or less at peace with one another. When the opposite is true, people (mostly men, of course) indulge a lethal impulse to prey on others. There is something very Freudian about this, but LaFree’s book contains no reference to the figure who taught us that “the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man” and that a civilized society requires this tendency’s diversion toward socially sanctioned outlets like competitive capitalist accumulation or cutthroat politics or law enforcement or military service (Freud 1958, 9). If LaFree snubs Freud, Roth in turn is not very generous in acknowledging his debt to LaFree. He grants the criminolo-