Conflict over consensus: Canadian and American homicide reconsidered.

The article is a comment on John Hagan's reply to the author's paper about Hagan's theory of Canadian-American difference in homicide rates. According to the author, Hagan seems to have fundamentally misconstrued his argument. Hagan's misunderstanding begins with the title of his reply: he focuses on crime and criminalization in general, while the author focuses on the rate of homicide. This difference is important because Hagan proposes different types of explanations for different types of crime. Indeed, The Disreputable Pleasures is organized around that distinction. Oddly, in his critique of the author's paper Hagan blurs the distinction he has himself established by claiming that he has offered a theory of Canadian-American differences in homicide rates that fuses structural and cultural themes. However, reviewing Hagan's work on Canadian-American differences in crime rates in general and in homicide rates in particular, the author fails to discover the structural component. Instead, Hagan attributes Canadian-American differences to dissimilarities in the way values were forged out of unique historical experiences on the respective frontiers of the two countries.