Prepare For Rash of Murders, Suicides, Civil Unrest

USA Today reports the number of police officers killed in the line of duty increased 20% during the first six months of 2009 compared with last year. All categories of officer deaths in the U.S. are up in 2009, including those killed by gunfire.

Steve McNair's girlfriend had mounting debts that included payments on a Cadillac Escalade, and LaToya Jackson is claiming Michael Jackson was murdered for his money.

European researchers have concluded what many of us already new, murders and suicides spike with unemployment.

"The scientists, who combed through almost four decades of European Union records," reports Bloomberg, "found that a 1 percent increase in joblessness brings about a 0.8 percent rise in suicide and murder rates. The global economy is now in its deepest recession since World War II, with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicting the output of its 30 members will shrink 4.1 percent this year. The slump has pushed unemployment to its highest since 1983 in the U.S. and the most in a decade in the 16 nations that use the euro.

“The effects of a financial crisis depend crucially on how governments chose to respond,” lead researcher David Stuckler of Oxford University said in a telephone interview. “Suicides are just the tip of the iceberg,” Stuckler said. “We can’t measure all the emotional distress. There is much more going on in the background in terms of human suffering.”

"When the social security system is less extensive, unemployment is a more probable mediator between mental illness and suicide," said Dr. Andreas Lundin and Dr. Tomas Hemmingsson, of the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. "A related concern is that fear and anxiety in the present crisis could be particularly long-lasting; even when the market recovers, people's worries and associated behaviors might not."

Even as far back as March of this year, Christian Science Monitor's Patrik Jonsson considered the mounting violence when he wrote about four Oakland, Calif., police officers who were shot down; an Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle looking for victims; seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home; and six people, including four kids, who died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, California.

"Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses," says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Criminologists say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s "saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47," Mr. Levin says.

Jonsson covers a study released in Florida which links domestic violence and job loss and foreclosures. The study claims Florida saw an almost 40 percent jump in demand for domestic-violence centers, an increase related to the state of the economy.

Jonsson's piece also directs our attention to the link between murder-suicides and the economy and a study by the Violence Policy Center in Washington. "We've been looking at this issue of whether there are more murder-suicides … [and] a pattern is starting to develop that may point in that direction," says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the center. "Between the Texas Tower shootings in the 1960s until the McDonald's massacre in 1984, it was extremely rare to see these types of mass shootings. Now we're seeing them much more often, and they do seem to happen in spurts."

Since we already live in a violent world, it's easy to dismiss the news reports of murders and suicides as isolated incidents unrelated to Depression 2.0 -- even as the violence multiplies before our eyes.

And we're just getting started. Unemployment will continue to rise to unprecedented levels. In the US, record numbers are receiving Food Stamps, and the welfare rolls continue to swell as state after state will follow California's lead into bankruptcy. The picture becomes even more chilling when you consider that each day more and more of the unemployed run out of their extended unemployment benefits. When all the benefits run out, the states go broke, and the US defaults, then what?