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Apr 6, 2018 at 21:38 comment added Quaternion @Johnny I agree, in addition the wild west attracted many settlers in these times highway men would have likely killed and disposed of more people, certainly many of those would not find their way into any cities record.
Nov 9, 2015 at 3:39 comment added DJClayworth You could argue that gunfights between drunk cowboys might not be as dangerous for regular folks as other kinds of violence ( though I don't think it would wash if it was your town). But specific figures are quoted and that is what we are checking.
Nov 9, 2015 at 3:30 comment added Ruut Steven Pinker has excellent data regarding Violence of Old vs. Violence of New.
Oct 21, 2015 at 20:45 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 20, 2015 at 18:52 comment added gnasher729 Assuming what @DJClayworth says is correct (drunken brawls between willing participants), most people don't care about the number of deaths, but the chances of becoming a victim. So these chances would be reasonably low if one didn't act stupid.
Oct 19, 2015 at 23:08 vote accept matt_black
Oct 19, 2015 at 15:15 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 15, 2015 at 19:21 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 15, 2015 at 13:31 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 15, 2015 at 13:25 comment added DJClayworth @DaleM Per 100,000 residents.
Oct 15, 2015 at 4:15 comment added Dale M Are the figures you quote per 100,000 residents or per 100,000 deaths?
Oct 15, 2015 at 1:01 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 13, 2015 at 18:46 comment added Brian M. Hunt Hollon's book seems available on Amazon for $7. amzn.com/B007R60H9O
Oct 13, 2015 at 16:41 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 13, 2015 at 16:18 comment added DJClayworth @Johnny While that's a good point, most homicides in the cattle towns were not "A sneakily killed B and buried his body in the woods", they were "A and B got drunk in town, got in a fight, and one ended up shooting the other." Not much investigation was required.
Oct 13, 2015 at 16:15 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 13, 2015 at 15:45 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 13, 2015 at 0:08 comment added DJClayworth The Cattle Towns is available for search on Google Books. Searching for Abilene seems to show up nothing that could be taken as the quote above.
Oct 12, 2015 at 23:58 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 12, 2015 at 20:25 comment added Dan Getz According to the paper by Anderson and Hill, the source of those quoted statistics is The Cattle Town by Robert A. Dykstra, not Hollon. Hollon's quoted comment in the same paragraph of that paper seems odd after reading this book review, which seems to indicate his book discusses a lot of frontier violence, not a lack of it. I don't have easy access to either book, unfortunately.
Oct 11, 2015 at 22:27 comment added DJClayworth I would love it if someone had access to Hollon and could tell us if and why he really states that figure.
Oct 11, 2015 at 22:25 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 11, 2015 at 22:05 comment added matt_black I like the fact that you seem to have found and undermined the actual source. Unless someone else wants to dig deeper into the alternative sources it looks like this is the definitive answer.
Oct 11, 2015 at 21:30 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 11, 2015 at 6:55 comment added Mark There's a confounding factor that doesn't appear to have been accounted for: modern medicine is highly effective at turning would-be homicides into first-degree assaults.
Oct 9, 2015 at 16:49 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 9, 2015 at 16:35 comment added Johnny I wonder how accurate the reported homicide rates are given that a death of mysterious circumstances (or a missing person) wouldn't be (and couldn't be) investigated to the degree that it is today.
Oct 9, 2015 at 16:25 history edited DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0
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Oct 9, 2015 at 16:11 history answered DJClayworth CC BY-SA 3.0