Finally some reports that indicate that I’m right. Check out The Peace Epidemic from a recent blog entry. It quotes from a piece in the Washington Post

By 2003, there were 40 percent fewer conflicts than in 1992. The deadliest conflicts — those with 1,000 or more battle-deaths — fell by some 80 percent. The number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians also dropped by 80 percent [between 1988 and 2001], while core human rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions of the developing world since the mid-1990s.

The news media wants us to be scared, and in fact, there is still some reason, but it seems to me that it’s a lot less than when I was growing up.