The stated goal of comparing only “western, industrialized” countries, we’re told, would be to “compare apples to apples”. \u00a0The real goal\u00a0is to try to cherrypick results. \u00a0Of course\u00a0<\/em>the US will have a higher murder rate than Denmark, Sweden or Belgium – all of them are small, socially and culturally homogenous countries. \u00a0 And\u00a0of course\u00a0<\/em>we’ll have a higher murder rate than, say, Japan – a larger nation, but with a socially homogenous population (that, incidentally, tolerates police powers that’d make the ACLU yak up it’s collective skull).<\/p>\nSo the correct response is to\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>compare apples to apples: \u00a0large, socially-diverse societies with at least a pretense of individual rights (and it may be a thin pretense indeed).<\/p>\nThere, the US and it’s 3.8\/100,000 murder rate (about 2\/3 of which are firearm murders) looks pretty good compared to other large, industralized,\u00a0socially and culturally heterogenous\u00a0<\/em>nations and the frictions and stresses they lend to the situation:<\/p>\n\nArgentina: 5.5<\/li>\n Brazil: 25.2<\/li>\n Russia: 9.0<\/li>\n South Africa: 31.0<\/li>\n India: \u00a03.5 (and virtually no civilian gun ownership)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBut I got to thinking: \u00a0What if we took the next step, and accounted for the effect of social and cultural diversity and history in the US murder rate?<\/p>\n
What effect would that have?<\/p>\n
We’ll tackle that next week:<\/p>\n
\nMonday: \u00a0We’ll look at the effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.<\/li>\n Tuesday: \u00a0We’ll look at the murder rate in the Deep South.<\/li>\n Wednesday: \u00a0We’ll see what the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you get into a discussion with “Gun Safety” advocates, they usually start by knowingly, solemnly intoning that the US has some variant of “the highest gun murder rate in the developed world”. In response to which I always ask two questions: Why just “western, developed countries?”: \u00a0The United States’ murder rate is actually in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[360],"class_list":["post-56595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-victim-disarmament","tag-gun-homicide-apples-and-apples"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56595"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56603,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56595\/revisions\/56603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}