I'm upset with the Colorado shooting. The media mislead us with all Monica/James Holmes all the time- lots of smoke and noise but little analysis or illumination. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's book shows that violence was much more common hundreds of years ago than today. Federal homicide statistics show that murder rates have been falling for the last 20 years - we are almost back to the murder rates of 1950. Total numbers of killings and cop killings are down, but some pundits claim that rampage killings (like Aurora) have decreased, some say that they haven't changed and some claim that they are more frequent.
Murder rates are 4 times as high in the South as in New England. How can we understand all this, how can we make our state or country kinder and safer?