Homicide
[10] Manslaughter is a form of homicide in which the person who commits the homicide either does not intend to kill the victim, or kills the victim as the result of circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed to the point of potentially losing control of their actions.
[11] The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th century BC.
The term "democide" was coined by American political scientist Rudolph Rummel to describe "murder by government" in general, which included both extrajudicial killings and widespread systematic acts of homicide.
[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] A 2011 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime brought together a wide variety of data sources to create a worldwide picture of trends and developments.
[43] On a per-capita scaled level, "the homicide rate in Africa and the Americas (at 17 and 16 per 100,000 population, respectively) is more than double the global average (6.9 per 100,000), whereas in Asia, Europe and Oceania (between 3 and 4 per 100,000) it is roughly half".
"[42] In the mid-second millennium, local levels of violence in Europe were extremely high by the standards of modern developed countries.
Typically, small groups of people would battle their neighbors using the farm tools at hand, such as knives, sickles, hammers, and axes.
Cities were few, and small in size, but their concentration of population was conducive to violence and their trends resembled those in rural areas.
Before then, harsh penalties were imposed for homicide (severe whipping or execution) but they proved ineffective at controlling or reducing the insults to honor that precipitated most of the violence.
Most historians attribute the trend in homicides to a steady increase in self-control of the sort promoted by Protestantism, and necessitated by schools and factories.
[46]: 127–32 Eisner argues that macro-level indicators for societal efforts to promote civility, self-discipline, and long-sightedness are strongly associated with fluctuations in homicide rates over the past six centuries.
[50] In the US, the National Violent Death Reporting System is a centralized database of relevant information from death certificates, coroner and medical examiner records, and law enforcement reports, which emerged from the National Violent Injury Statistics System.
In 2020, there were 18,439 cases of single homicide (28.6% of all violent deaths) in the 48 states and DC, a rate of 6.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.
A larger proportion of homicides of females than males resulted from caregiver abuse or neglect (9.0% versus 2.7%) or were perpetrated by a suspect with a mental health problem (e.g., schizophrenia or other psychotic conditions, depression, or posttraumatic stress disorder) (6.3% versus 1.7%).
The overall firearm homicide rate in 2020 was higher than in the last 20 years, disproportionately borne by Native Americans and Black persons.
