How can the propensity of Americans to violence and crime be explained? First, the settlement of America was the unsettlement of those who left Europe or Africa for America. They tore up their roots, and left behind their customs, laws, religious and legal commitments that had, for centuries, provided the boundaries of their lives. Second, life in the New World invited - at times almost required - violence and lawlessness; the open land was had for the taking; Indians were regarded as savages with no real rights to the soil, who were to be driven out or killed off; slavery, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous of passions,” all too often degraded master and slave alike. Add to this a philosophy of individualism - originally a pejorative term - which not only invited but rewarded self-aggrandizement and the exploitation of the weak, in a ceaseless quest for wealth and power, and a violent exploitation of nature, an exploitation that still goes on before our eyes.