The Death Penalty or Life Meaning Life

[MMI]

Murder is not a black or working class crime. It is certainly not a female crime. While more murders occur among the lower classes, they are usually committed in the heat of the moment, whereas, when a killing takes place among the higher social classes, power or money is usually the motive. It might be cynical of me, but I suggest that working class killers use murder where they see no other option, or where they lose control, while upper class killers see murder as the most expedient way to achieve their purposes, after calculating the pro's and con's and concluding that a person's death is necessary. Such people would never be called yobs or trash.

Since a sizable percentage of murders in the lower classes are gang related I'd suggest your premise above is false MMI.

If anything the economic motive is more commonplace in the lower classes, where a sizable percentage of killings are related to the drug trade. A crack dealer in the inner city has a 25% chance of surviving the next 5 years. Three in four crack dealers will die over that five year period, the vast majority in gang related homicides (aka turf wars). Rival gangs protecting territories related to the drug trade is without a doubt an economic motive.

You could be right - I have no way to refute or confirm what you say, and I cannot support my assertion with any meaningful facts or statistics: it is an impression I have.

However, I still think that turf wars take place as a result of an inability to deal with the "invasion" of a patch in any other way, whereas, if the gangs were run by ... ummm - let us say "business men" ... there might be a meeting around a long polished table, where compromises would be sought, deals would be cut, and concessions would be made. Only if these "negotiations" failed, would any deaths follow, and then on a selective basis. (I'm hypothesising ... tell me to get real if you like, but it seems to me that people with working class backgrounds resort to violence much more quickly than people from middle class backgrounds.)