Murder, suicide rates up in parts of U.S. - study

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Murder rates are on the rise in a handful of U.S. states, according to a federal study that bolsters indications the nation as a whole may be experiencing its first significant jump in violent deaths since the early 1990s.

The finding, published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was based on data from the first six states to take part in the federal agency’s national violent-death reporting system.

The overall murder rate in these states - Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina and Virginia - jumped 6 percent between 2000 and 2002 and another 4 percent between 2002 and 2003, to 5.49 per 100,000 people, the CDC said.

The rising murder rates were fueled by a jump in homicides among males under the age of 25, mimicking the trend of the 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S. murder rates also increased.

The suicide rate was stable in the six states between 2000 and 2002, but it rose 5 percent between 2002 and 2003, to 9.37 per 100,000. The increase was largely due to rises in self-inflicted deaths among women of all ages.

Some sociologists have tied rising murder and suicide rates to changes in the economy as well as a greater availability of drugs and guns. The U.S. economy grew robustly for much of the 1990s, but fell into recession in March 2001 and the job market was sluggish even after the recession ended in November of that year.

The Atlanta-based CDC said it was not certain what had caused the rising rates of violent deaths and did not say whether it believed that they shadowed a similar trend for the rest of the nation.

But it noted that its findings were “consistent with final data from law enforcement reports compiled by the FBI, which indicate an increase in the national homicide rate in 2003.”

The six states, which accounted for 11 percent of the murders and 10 percent of suicides in 2002, were in step with the rest of the nation between 1993 and 2000, when national homicide and suicide rates fell sharply.

The CDC said it hoped that its report would lead to a better understanding of personal and social risk factors for violence and help spur development of prevention programs. 

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