I recently read this blog post (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/07/knives_guns_a...) on the BBC website about how the official statistics for knife attacks among teenagers in Britain do not live up to the headlines or panic. This seems similar to a lot of the examples discussed in the book. In particular, the rise in knife crime roughly matches a fall in gun crime, and mostly in big cities.

Mark Easton's conclusion is that "I don't think these figures tell a story of increasingly ferocious juvenile violence sweeping the land. Instead, they offer clues to the nature of predominantly urban gang culture."

Some of the comments to this post though make me realise that it's
hard to read into any statistics. Is there any way to really judge if society is getting more violent?