IIRC, the more violent deaths per capita is documented supposedly in Steven Pinker's book.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Quote from a review: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/...-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html
His book is controversial to say the least.
About the line above that most people died at the hands of their communist governments, I might suggest a return to the history books. Millions died at the hands of others (forget WWII?). Not the just the Germans but millions in China due to the Japanese and even in India due to British Imperial policies.
About whether guns cause violence, the usual mantra is that people kill, guns are just tools. The counter argument (presented for your eddification) is that the presence of a firearm primes aggression. Makes you more prone to aggressive ideation and action. Now, not to present a lit review, but the research is controversial in lab settings and the transfer of lab findings and their ecological validity to the real world is debated in on going meta-analyses.
A version of this is that guns being a distance weapon make it more likely to use them. Personal violence is difficult for people but distance makes it easy. To give an extreme example, if I told you that if you set this 8 year old girl in front of you on fire, you will end the war - you might have difficult doing that. Setting her on fire from a B-29, easier to do.
Violence and aggression are complex. We have socialized and biological forces that interact. Most arguments turn to cliches.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Quote from a review: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/...-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html
Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th — deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “pacification process.”
His book is controversial to say the least.
About the line above that most people died at the hands of their communist governments, I might suggest a return to the history books. Millions died at the hands of others (forget WWII?). Not the just the Germans but millions in China due to the Japanese and even in India due to British Imperial policies.
About whether guns cause violence, the usual mantra is that people kill, guns are just tools. The counter argument (presented for your eddification) is that the presence of a firearm primes aggression. Makes you more prone to aggressive ideation and action. Now, not to present a lit review, but the research is controversial in lab settings and the transfer of lab findings and their ecological validity to the real world is debated in on going meta-analyses.
A version of this is that guns being a distance weapon make it more likely to use them. Personal violence is difficult for people but distance makes it easy. To give an extreme example, if I told you that if you set this 8 year old girl in front of you on fire, you will end the war - you might have difficult doing that. Setting her on fire from a B-29, easier to do.
Violence and aggression are complex. We have socialized and biological forces that interact. Most arguments turn to cliches.