But when you add guns to a violent situation, you get a higher level of murder".
"If you can create doubt that this was a planned series of killings, then you have a chance of defeating the level of murder that carries the death penalty," said Geoffrey Corn, an expert on military law at South Texas College of Law in Houston.
Manslaughter, either voluntary or involuntary, is a lesser felony than that punishes unlawful killing that do not rise to the level of murder.
Accompanying Venezuela's soaring levels of murders and kidnappings, its cemeteries are the setting for a new kind of crime wave.
South Africa has some of the highest levels of murder in the world.
In part this reflects the broader violence of Honduran society, which has some of the world's worst levels of murder, organised crime, drug trafficking, gun use, inequality and corruption.
For much of its history, this small country has suffered levels of murder unimaginable almost anywhere else outside of wartime, primarily due to turf battles and revenge killings by the Mara Salvatrucha (better known as MS-13), and Barrio 18, which is split into two factions.
An analysis of the data from Honduras is revealing; this small central American country has had a very high level of transphobic murders since the autumn of 2008, but only one recorded before then.
In a democracy that relies on trust in its institutions, and the consent of the governed, that diminishment of faith is a national tragedy on the level of the murder of a President.
The first problem was that under Minnesota law telling a police officer of your plans to kill someone does not rise to the level of attempted murder, and the most serious of the charges against LaDue were dismissed.
