Jul 13, 2016 4 min read

Chances are, because you are reading this editorial, you are a person who follows the news on a regular basis. And those who have paid attention to what has happened lately – the killing of black men by police and the awful retaliation in Dallas, and the terrorist attacks here and around the world that have taken so many lives – may be experiencing that sick feeling of despair.

What sort of future awaits a country, stoked by fear, where there are more guns than people? How can this world rid itself of the hatred and resentment that turns innocent children into the murderous thugs that take such joy in the slaughter of strangers?

You may think we are living in times of unprecedented violence, but nothing could be further from the truth. Fact is, life on this planet has never been safer from death by attack or accident. We are many times less likely to die or be injured by criminals, enemies, disease, poisoning or modes of transportation than the people who lived a century ago, when Earth’s population was but a fourth of what it is now.

A glance at the front pages of the Washington Observer from 100 years ago will dispel the notion that life in Southwestern Pennsylvania then was bucolic and harmonious. During the first three weeks of July 1916, these events made the news:

• A 17-year-old Avella boy fires a bullet into the heart of the stepfather who beat him mercilessly.

• A stray bullet fired July 4 nearly kills a woman sitting in the parlor of her West Beau Street home in Washington.

• The mangled body of a Bentleyville man is found along railroad tracks near Bentleyville.

• A coal miner is crushed to death in a roof fall in a McDonald mine, exactly six months after his brother suffered a similar fate.

• A Newell man, described as a “cripple” who had both legs cut off by a train, is charged with attempting to slash his mother’s throat.

• A soldier from Bulger is killed in an accidental shooting in the Philippines, while another soldier serving on the Mexican border with the Tenth Regiment, sent there to engage Pancho Villa and his insurgents, drowns in the Rio Grande.

• Two Italians are wounded in a gun battle in Monessen involving rival gangs engaged in illegal activities including “white slavery.”

• A Civil War veteran is killed while attempting to cross tracks in McDonald.

• A chicken thief dies of heart failure after a pursuing Speers farmer fires his gun.

• A former Washington man has his feet cut off while crossing trolley tracks.

• George McQuown of Washington watches helplessly as his wife is strangled to death beneath their overturned car in West Virginia.

• A carnival worker is arrested in Charleroi for the murder of a Fayette County child.

• An 8-year-old boy in Washington dies from an infected wound on his foot after stepping on a can lid.

• A Belle Vernon man dies after a train strikes his car.

And there was much more going on beyond Washington County. One hundred years ago today, the Battle of Verdun in World War I was in its 143rd day. Infantile paralysis – polio – was killing scores of children a day. Blacks in the South, even those accused of petty thefts, were being lynched.

Polls show most Americans believe crime is on the rise, but that’s not the case.

Today, according to the Brookings Institute, the national crime rate is about half of what it was at its height in 1991. Violent crime has fallen by 51 percent since 1991, and property crime by 43 percent. In 2013 the violent crime rate was the lowest since 1970. And this holds true for unreported crimes as well. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, since 1993 the rate of violent crime has declined from 79.8 to 23.2 victimizations per 1,000 people.

Perhaps surprisingly, crimes involving guns, including murder, have also decreased.

Today, we have medicine to fight infection and consumer-safety laws to protect us from injury. And we should take heart that shocking events like those in Baton Rouge and Dallas and Orlando raise so much concern and demand for change.

We need to take a deep breath, avoid the hysterics of the internet and social media, and realize that although the nation may not be coming together, neither is it falling apart.