A piercing observation marked a vigil at a Prince George’s County, Maryland, recreation center last week. A crowd had gathered to mourn a 22-year-old aspiring rapper, J.R. Reid Franklin, gunned down in broad daylight in the parking lot, and an angry Victoria Lee chastised them.
“Back in the day, you would fistfight,” said Lee, 56, a friend of the victim’s mother, “but now all you want to do is bring out guns and knives and shoot each other. “
Lee raged not only at Franklin’s death, but also at what she calls the out-of-control violence that threatens death over every disagreement.
People used to fight and “nobody went and got a bat, nobody went and got a gun, nobody went and got anything,” Lee told me Wednesday in an interview. Now “they die over nothing.”
Put the question “Do people fist-fight anymore?” to social media, and a grim consensus emerges.
“You could have a fight with a guy in the old days and two days later be playing basketball with them,” said one Facebook poster.
“The ‘fair’ fight is a thing of the past,” wrote someone else. “There are a lot of bullies these days. They gang up and jump someone and tape it. Humiliation. Then don’t understand when that kid returns to shoot him.”
DaVante Lovett, 21, who hosts the “Teen Talk Radio Theater” show in Chicago, says: “Some are afraid to fight because of the videos. If you lose the fight, you are not masculine any more. It’s all about image and perception. Back in the day, people respected that you fought regardless of win/lose. Nowadays, you lose friends, respect and the courage to fight again.”
A 2014 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that the percentage of high-schoolers involved in a fight dropped from 42 percent to 25 percent between 1993 and 2013. The percentage of students who reported carrying a weapon onto school property during the previous 30 days declined from 12 percent to 5 percent.
“They’re getting into fewer fights, it’s clear, in every major city,” says Ron Avi Astor, a professor of school behavioral health at the University of Southern California, but it’s not because they’re shooting more. “Homicides in neighborhoods and streets and schools, even that’s gone down since the 1990s.”
There have been 105 people killed in Washington this year, a nearly 44 percent increase from last year — but in 1995, 361 people were killed.
In Chicago, there were roughly 400 homicides last year. Yet, during the 1980s and 1990s, more than 600 people were killed each year, with some years reaching more than 900 homicides.
So the bigger picture is that there’s an overall drop in violence in the United States over the past several decades. But we feel more imperiled, and the reasons explain much about this moment.
“There’s been a norms change,” Astor says. It happened in the 1990s with Columbine and other school shootings, he theorizes.
The media and the public dialed in to violence in a way they hadn’t before. Gradually this extended event to those communities that were marginalized and voiceless. Certain behaviors were no longer acceptable.
Domestic violence used to be joked about (see Ralph Kramden: “Pow! Right in the kisser”); now that’s not acceptable. At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, fraternity brothers probably thought it was funny to hang a “Freshman daughter drop off” banner last month, but they were accused of promoting campus sexual assault and their chapter was suspended. Big-game hunting used to be the province of revered presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt, but the dentist who killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe has had to go underground.
In all sorts of ways, people are calling a timeout to say, “It ain’t that type of party in America any more.”
“We have changed as a society and as a country … particularly around questions of violence, victimization and youth,” Astor says. “I can’t remember as a child a story on cable on bullying. Today, it goes viral.”
This tolerance change is why we feel things are out of control now when they’ve been far worse in years past. It’s why police feel targeted though they are statistically safer than they were decades ago (according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 84 officers were shot and killed in the first six months of 1973 alone; 27 officers were killed in 2013, the fewest in a 35-year period, and 51 were killed in 2014).
This change is also why “Black Lives Matter.” Because increasingly, one more shooting, stabbing, rape, racist incident, report of gay-bashing, cop killing, whatever is too many.
Our big challenge as a society and as a culture, Astor says, is to get to where we’re not just responding to what’s happened, we’re creating what we want to see happen.
It is a sea change that comes when people are raising big, provocative questions. Like why don’t kids fight anymore.