Public health professionals have called for the use of epidemiologic methods to study violence, particularly firearm-related homicide. This literature review uses epidemiology texts to evaluate the extent to which public health research has complied with epidemiologic methodology, focusing primarily on the two medical journals publishing most extensively on the topic. Most studies and reports surveyed failed in at least one way to observe basic standards of the science of epidemiology.
Throughout history, governments have sometimes executed persons in groups for the same offense. The United States has done less of it than most, with or without due process. But although never numerous, a look at an unstudied aspect of both multiple homicide and capital punishment showed the occurrence of posttrial mass executions—four or more persons for the same incident—interesting for what they tell about the social climate of the eras in which they occurred, particularly regarding the place of Blacks in society. Before the end of slavery, more than half of the mass legal executions were of Blacks, generally for slave revolts. After that, Blacks were still disproportionately involved relative to population, accounting for one third of those executed. Counting mass lynchings would probably raise the percentage toward that in the pre-1866 era and to the percentage of Blacks legally executed overall.
When terrorists engaged in what the Bush Administration has described as unlawful acts of war, the approximately 3,000 deaths they caused meant that two government agencies-and/or those reporting to those agencies-would have to decide how those deaths should be coded. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) records deaths in the United States based on the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with its Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), records deaths reported by state and local law enforcement agencies as murder and non-negligent manslaughter and justifiable homicides of felons by law enforcement and civilians. The decision how to record the September 11 deaths cannot be avoided but, by the end of 2001, it had not been made by either agency (personal communication regarding NCHS; Harwood, 2001, regarding FBI). 1 Although the NCHS and UCR were undecided as to how to classify the deaths, most of the rest of the administration has implicitly, if not explicitly, viewed them as acts of war. The obvious choice for NCHS is between classifying those deaths in the ICD-10 category Y-36, War operations, or in one or more of the categories X85 to Y09, Assault (homicide). For the FBI, the decision may be more difficult. That agency only collects and reports data on criminal homicides, with no existing basis for reporting deaths from acts of war. With only one thirtieth as many casualties, the worst previous mass murder-at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City-was classified as homicide. Footnotes explained that data from the explosion made 1995 UCR reports for Oklahoma and Oklahoma City incomparable to previous years, but they did not explain why deaths from explosives rose from 361
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