ABSTRACT
To return to the sharply refocused political landscape Franklin Zimring offers us: Zimring is surely right that a key political consequence follows from the misleading confounding of crime and violence. Zimring argues it is a "general propensity toward violence", rather than a propensity toward crime, that explains the American obsession with violence—;;both in terms of the actual rate of violence and the salience of the fear of violence in American politics. In seeking the unique ingredient of American culture to explain violence, one is tempted to speak of slavery and heterogeneity, but it is not clear what they have to do with this propensity toward violence. Americans relentlessly purport to believe that theirs is the most dangerous of times, because to believe so is to redeem their general social and economic insecurity. It is a way of dignifying the conventional miseries and constraints of bourgeois life.
