Low Cocaine Supply Cited as U.S. Murder Toll Soars

America’s murder toll may break a decade-old record this year, the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday. It blamed rising stockpiles of assault weapons and shrinking supplies of cocaine.

If the pace of killing continues, the committee said, 23,220 people will be murdered this year. That figure would make it, in the words of the panel’s chairman, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), “the bloodiest year in American history.”

The panel said that murders are projected to top last year’s total by 2,000 and exceed even the record of 23,040 in 1980.

The current murder rate of 10.5 per 100,000 people makes the United States “the most murderous industrialized nation” in the world, the panel said. In Great Britain, the rate is 0.8 per 100,000; in Japan, 1.0, and in West Germany, 1.2.

As reasons for the soaring murder toll, the committee cited:

--Dwindling supplies of cocaine in major cities, which it said has ignited drug turf wars.

--A growing arsenal of assault weapons in the hands of drug dealers and other lawbreakers. “These firearms have become the weapons of choice for drug dealers and the weapons of doom for law enforcement personnel,” the committee said.

--A fresh wave of jobless, crime-prone teen-agers.

The report said that the murder toll “began to rise significantly in the late 1960s and did not fall until the early 1980s. . . . This trend followed from an unusually large number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the general population.

“This age group is the most violent one, and the murder toll often swells with its ranks.”

The nation’s murder total fell 18% from 1980 to 1985, but it has risen 22% since then.

Dr. J. Lawrence Cogan, chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County, said that, as drug wars sweep inner-city street corners, he is “seeing more cases of multiple gunshot wounds, and many of these involving high-velocity firearms.”

Biden urged swift House action on a Senate-passed bill that would ban nine semiautomatic assault weapons and impose the death penalty for 34 federal offenses.

Drawing on FBI figures, the committee said that California led the nation in murders last year with 3,158. The panel projected violent deaths this year in the nation’s most-populous state at 3,442, a 9% increase.