Homicide Rates Around the World

I believe that those of you who are complaining about "cherry picking" are missing the point. I believe the point being properly made is that the vast majority of gun owning American citizens are law abiding and peaceable; it is those folks who live in either gun free or heavily regulated urban areas that have high levels of drug use, broken families, and poor education systems that lead to high crime rates. You may say that those behaviors are the result of the political leadership in those area but the responsibility really rests upon those who elect these so called "leaders".
 
lemaymiami said:
Just for Bearcreak.... If you live in one of the above described big cities you'd have a hard time not believing that their current governments bear a good bit of responsibility for current conditions.... This from a guy who worked the streets during the height of the cocaine cowboy era down here in paradise....
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I wasn't disagreeing with that idea. I think it's probably true. My point was that it isn't a good argument since there's basically no alternative to point to. Even if true, no one can actually prove that a Republican run mega city, in our current cultural climate, would have less violent crime. Such a thing doesn't exist.
 
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I believe the point being properly made is that the vast majority of gun owning American citizens are law abiding and peaceable; it is those folks who live in either gun free or heavily regulated urban areas that have high levels of drug use, broken families, and poor education systems that lead to high crime rates.
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The point was specifically a comparison with other nations. The problem is that the same is largely true of other nations too. The vast majority of the citizens of most countries are law-abiding and peaceable, much of the crime is concentrated in large urban areas in most countries and if you removed the statistics from half-dozen of the highest crime cities of most countries, they would drop down the list significantly when ranked by the incidence violent crime.
 
bearcreek said:
:thumbup: Yup. The problem is cultural. There is no governmental solution.

So, half of the 6 most violent cities are in states with complete state firearms law preemption and what most here would consider to be "good" gun laws.


Obviously most of the violent cities are going to have Democrat governments since most cities in general have Democrat governments. Correlation can be related to, but does not automatically equal, causation.
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Just keep telling yourself that. When you wind up in hell you could make yourself feel better by saying well, “ Everybody down here isn’t a Democrat.”
 
Boom Vang said:
Yup, bad juju. Visit the BVI, and leave the USVI to the savages.
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I could see parts of St. Thomas being dangerous, locals on locals, but St. John is like Mayberry. I wouldn't leave my phone on the bar and go to the restroom, but I wouldn't do that here.
 
theotherwaldo said:
America is far from the most violent nation in the world, but we do have have half-a-dozen of the more violent cities.
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...worth noting they all also implement policies that are anti gun and pro crime...

Only an idiot could think that is going to work out well. Only having armed criminals...there isn't a word for how stupid the idea is....
 
JohnKSa said:
The point was specifically a comparison with other nations. The problem is that the same is largely true of other nations too. The vast majority of the citizens of most countries are law-abiding and peaceable, much of the crime is concentrated in large urban areas in most countries and if you removed the statistics from half-dozen of the highest crime cities of most countries, they would drop down the list significantly when ranked by the incidence violent crime.
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True, but not the whole picture either. The top six crime cities in the US are in both restrictive and non-restrictive gun rights states. This would seem to support the argument that there is not a causal relationship between gun laws and crime rates. Other nations may very well have violent crime centered more in urban areas and perhaps the reason for that is similar to what is happening here. On the other hand, many nations are much more homogenous with much different demographics than the US, are much smaller, and have fewer large urban areas. I guess the take-away is that using the national crime rate to gauge how dangerous the US is is misleading since the majority of our huge country is not that bad.
 
This would seem to support the argument that there is not a causal relationship between gun laws and crime rates.
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Yup. It's more complicated than that.
Other nations may very well have violent crime centered more in urban areas and perhaps the reason for that is similar to what is happening here.
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No matter where you go, there is more crime in urban areas although the specific level varies from one urban area to the another. There are some main underlying reasons for why crime concentrates in urban areas, but there are also reasons why not all urban areas have identical per capita crime rates.
On the other hand, many nations are much more homogenous with much different demographics than the US, are much smaller, and have fewer large urban areas.
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Yeah, it's not that simple. That could contribute to either higher crime or lower crime depending on a number of factors. A country without much LE presence and tribal rivalries could be very violent even if it is very rural and very homogeneous in terms of race and religion. It's not hard to find examples. On the other hand, Singapore is entirely urban (city state) is pretty ethnically diverse, has very restrictive weapons laws and still has a relatively low crime rate.
I guess the take-away is that using the national crime rate to gauge how dangerous the US is is misleading since the majority of our huge country is not that bad.
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Or, because the rural and suburban areas are also factored into the overall national crime rates, one could say that they are misleading about the crime rates of urban areas because the urban areas tend to have higher crime than the national average would suggest.

The point is that if you want to do a fair comparison, the comparison needs to be apples to apples.

Examples of reasonable comparisons
National crime rate of one country to national crime rate of another country.
Urban crime rate to urban crime rate.
Rural crime rate to rural crime rate.

Examples of unfair comparisons.
National crime rate of one country to urban crime rate of another country.
National crime rate of one country with the statistics of the half-dozen highest crime urban areas removed to unaltered national crime rate of another country.
 
Personally, I believe that we are seeing a concerted effort to institute a federal police system.
This would eliminate all or most state and local law enforcement powers, eliminating the ability of cities and states to resist the implementation of federal laws and rules such as gun control or whether or not to prosecute pedophiliacs... .
 
Note that those stats are rates per 100,000. That is very misleading. And what they include in those stats is also a consideration. One rare killing in a small population city is going to make it's rate higher than a major city of millions. And yes, there is a strong correlation between liberal cities and crime.
 
d2wing said:
Good point.
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What I've been trying to get at here is that it doesn't do any good for us "pro gun" folks to use unproveable arguments, even when we "know" them to be true. If we can't actually prove it, it doesn't matter. I hear the bit about "Democrat run cities" all the time and I certainly agree that their standard policies don't help. The problem is, there aren't any major cities that are run by Republicans or Independents with which to compare them. There's no control group. Facts don't care about feelings and some of those facts are, all major US cities are run by Democrats, all major US cities have a violent crime problem and there is no correlate-able difference between cities in states with very liberal gun laws and cities in states with very strict gun laws. The problem is not with guns or gun laws. The problem's origin lies in the culture and in the home and has no governmental solution whatsoever, other than to stay as far out of the way as possible.
 
That's mostly true, but there have been exceptions. However I am not going to waste time looking them up. If I recall Miami was one but I don't recall for sure so I have no dispute with you. Perhaps we can agree that the practice of not punishing criminals and punishing law abiding citizens is not working. A major point is that a few population centers controlled by Democrats make up a voting block that can control elections and the country. Arguments don't really matter because truth no longer matters. Just opinions and made up "facts".
 
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d2wing said:
That's mostly true, but there have been exceptions. However I am not going to waste time looking them up. If I recall Miami was one but I don't recall for sure so I have no dispute with you. Perhaps we can agree that the practice of not punishing criminals and punishing law abiding citizens is not working.
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In the past, yes, there have been major cities that weren't Democrat controlled. Not any more. That's why, in my response to @lemaymiami, I specified,
bearcreek said:
in our current cultural climate
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Many things were different in the past.
 
As Rush Limbaugh once (and many times afterwards...) said -don't bother arguing with the folks running things - they need to be defeated at the polls (where it counts - my opinion). In my view the whole anti-gun thing that side of the political spectrum advocates -is just one of many, many very bad policies they favor.

As a retired cop - I knew long ago that the following policies would very badly work against law and order... Here's a few - in no particular order... they halted "stop and frisk" - a real crime prevention tool. They greatly reduced the size of the police departments in areas where that had an immediate downside... guaranteeing less protection for the folks at the bottom of the economic scale - who are the greatest group of crime victims. Then came ending cash bail -that was beyond stupid since it meant that an offender was not only back on the street within hours -but could obtain the name and addresses of victims, witnesses, etc - through their court appointed lawyer of course... Lastly, anytime you deliberately reduce officer's confidence in the folks they work for... you can predict the result in advance - since the best police work is self motivated... Since late in my career I also ran the Internal Affairs unit for my small department - this is an item that didn't take much thought to come to a conclusion...

I'll get down off of my soapbox now - and still maintain that anti-gun policies are just one factor in the terrible rise in bad consequences for folks living in liberal run big cities... My best hope is that this year, at the ballot box we can begin to reverse these terrible policies and that once again our society will care for victims a lot more than the ciriminals we're allowing to operate....
 
How about this for a comparison to consider: 2 states. Very close population numbers (12,972,091 vs 12,582,515), education numbers (91.7% HS grads 33.8% Bachelors or better vs 90.1% HS and 36.7% Bachelors) income numbers ($41,234 per capita vs $43,198) poverty numbers (11.8% vs 11.9%), and population per mile (290.6 vs 230.8). If their firearms restrictions and homicide rates were significantly different, (state one is PA, state two is IL, and IL's homicide rate is 30 percent higher than PA's) would such a comparison validate the position that legislation restricting the civil rights of law abiding citizens doesn't provide a measurable improvement in social safety?
 
Pudge said:
If their firearms restrictions and homicide rates were significantly different, (state one is PA, state two is IL, and IL's homicide rate is 30 percent higher than PA's) would such a comparison validate the position that legislation restricting the civil rights of law abiding citizens doesn't provide a measurable improvement in social safety?
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It would help to prove that point, yes. What it would not prove is that simply having more guns available and accessible lowers the crime rate. My contention is that there isn't a correlation. Look at the homicide rates by state. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm There's simply no detectable correlation between homicide rates and state firearms law and firearm prevalence or even firearms carry. Please understand that I'm very much in favor of liberal or almost no gun laws. That's part of the reason I moved where I did. But there's no reason to think that the low violent crime rate here is caused by the ubiquity of guns.
 
If Elon has his way we will one day be able to compare crime statistics across the solar system. The future city on Mars will have zero crime right? The governance will have learned from all of Earth's cities and the fresh start on Mars will be a utopia.😇
 
bearcreek said:
It would help to prove that point, yes. What it would not prove is that simply having more guns available and accessible lowers the crime rate. My contention is that there isn't a correlation. Look at the homicide rates by state. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm There's simply no detectable correlation between homicide rates and state firearms law and firearm prevalence or even firearms carry. Please understand that I'm very much in favor of liberal or almost no gun laws. That's part of the reason I moved where I did. But there's no reason to think that the low violent crime rate here is caused by the ubiquity of guns.
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I went to your link and found about what I expected. NM is close to the top of dangerous states to live in. It is the 5th largest state and contains a paltry 2.1 million people which makes it seem to be an extremely dangerous place to live. This is not true if you remove the population centered around the intersections of I-25 and I-40 and extending up and down the Rio Grande River where at only a guess close to half of the state's population make their homes. Take that area away and it would be low on the list of dangerous states. This is just more proof that the denser the population the higher the gun crime rate is. A lot of it is teenagers. Digging a little deeper you will find that almost half of NM deaths by gunshot are suicides. Counting suicides skews the numbers but gun control proponents never mention this. If a person is determined to end their life they will find a way. A gun only makes it quick and easy. I have 0 sympathy for people that do this.

This has nothing to do with the overall rating of the US to other countries. That is determined by total gun deaths compared to total population.
 
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Another factor that has been left out of this discussion is the number of drug related shootings that take place. If this country didn't have the drug (legal or illegal) trafficking and addiction problems the murder rates would plummet. I don't think the rest of the world as a whole has nearly the drug addition problems that we experience, and as they legalize more of the formerly illegal drugs the problem will only get worse.
 
bearcreek said:
It would help to prove that point, yes. What it would not prove is that simply having more guns available and accessible lowers the crime rate. My contention is that there isn't a correlation. Look at the homicide rates by state. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm There's simply no detectable correlation between homicide rates and state firearms law and firearm prevalence or even firearms carry. Please understand that I'm very much in favor of liberal or almost no gun laws. That's part of the reason I moved where I did. But there's no reason to think that the low violent crime rate here is caused by the ubiquity of guns.
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"No detectable correlation between homicide rates and state firearms law"

That is a damning assessment of gun control legislation.
 
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