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UN Report Reveals Odds of Being Murdered Country By Country
ananyo (2519492) writes "A new UN report (link to data) details comprehensive country-by-country murder rates. Safest is Singapore, with just one killing per 480,000 people in 2012. In the world's most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime. The Economist includes an intriguing 'print only interactive' (see the PDF) and has some tongue-in-cheek tips on how to avoid being slain: 'First, don't live in the Americas or Africa, where murder rates (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000 respectively) are more than four times as high as the rest of the world. Next, be a woman. Your chance of being murdered will be barely a quarter what it would be were you a man. In fact, steer clear of men altogether: nearly half of all female murder-victims are killed by their partner or another (usually male) family member. But note that the gender imbalance is less pronounced in the rich world, probably because there is less banditry, a mainly male pursuit. In Japan and South Korea slightly over half of all murder victims are female. Then, sit back and grow older. From the age of 30 onwards, murder rates fall steadily in most places.'"
In order to live as long as possible, I have decided to have gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, and I will move to Antarctica and start a utopian lesbian society, since there are no murders there. I haven't worked out the details yet, but it seems like a no-brainer.
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I have lived 2 years in Singapore, and indeed it is a tremendously safe place. Nobody worries about taking a shortcut through an alley, something not done in most western cities. It does mean that my local friends were often uncomfortable when traveling abroad, all countries seem dangerous after you've experienced Singapore.
It may not be a democracy, but we have to admit, they do a lot of things RIGHT. It is a pleasure to live there, as long as you have no political ambitions.
Yes, because the U.N. is known for shoddy science.
The data files include the source of the figures, generally reported by the WHO instead of the national police in those countries where the official figures may be suspect. If there are official complaints about the figures, they'll likely come from the ambassador of Bananazuela who will claim that the figures for his tourist-friendly country are too high.
John
A women may be less likely to be murdered but more likely to be raped.
Most of the places where this is a problem are the less developed countries, ones where the data is already suspect for different reasons anyway, and where the numbers are often already high. The really enlightening bits are comparing the first world countries, all of whom have a very similar definition of murder (this is actually much better than generic"violent crime" stats where definitions do vary largely)
What really stands out is that most of the first world countries fall in a range of 1-2 murders per 100000 people per year, except the USA which is more than double that. Always amazing to see how different the USA is than other countries that should be so similar (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, even England) and how the public opinion in the USA is so against any efforts at improving the situation (better education. Health care for all, less inequality, gun control, all the things that have proven to work in the rest of the western world)
At least in the US, women kill more men than women.
Also, while gender issues folks are more than happy to do all sorts of mental gymnastics for other things: nobody is willing to touch "why do men commit robbery more?" with a ten foot pole because then they'd have to admit that traditional gender roles for men are still very much in place, men are judged heavily by their economic status, and men are committing crime by and large to house, feed, and clothe their families.
Lots of assistance for single mothers out there, like WIC. Single dads? Shit outta luck.
Guess what percentage of the US homeless population is male? Depending on the area, anywhere from 67% to 80% (NYC, for example, is 82%.) Oh, and the percentage of women in homeless shelters is higher than the percentage of homeless women total, showing women are better served.
Male privilege, my ass.
Please help metamoderate.
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This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
The US murder rate is more than double that of the rest of the western world. Despite the four points I listed being the biggest differences between your country and the other Western democracies. Your personal refusal to even consider any possible improvement in that situation is endemic of the problem that causes your chance of being murdered to be more than double that of any other western citizen.
I'm glad you're OK with your odds, after all, you choose them.
A women may be less likely to be murdered but more likely to be raped.
That's mostly because the FBI doesn't consider prison rape to be a crime; I think the estimates I hear are typically around 200,000-300,000 male prison rape victims a year, which comes close to making the rape stats 50/50. There's also very little interest in figuring out the underreporting rate for male rape victims in open society; hell, in many places it isn't even a crime for a woman to rape a man because of the way rape was defined.
But even if you ignore all that: I'll take those odds. Rape has the lowest occurrence rate in the US of any violent crime, and not only that, it's declined the most over the last decade or two as well. Men are several times more likely to be KILLED. Last time I checked, that was worse.
By the way: case clearance rates for female homicide victims are higher than for male homicide victims.
You can either listen to the gender issues folks, who make it sound like violence against women is a HUGE CRISIS, or you can read the BJS statistics. Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.
Please help metamoderate.
What the UN report leaves out is one important factor in the US: about half of the perpetrators and victims of homicide are young African American males, completely out of proportion to their prevalence population; that's what accounts for most of the difference between US and other Western murder rates.
Gun control isn't going to help reduce those murder rates. Nor can those murder rates be explained through racism or bias in the justice system. Until politicians get serious and address this issue, African Americans are going to continue to get killed and locked up at a frightening rate. Unfortunately, our current president has been totally ineffective in doing anything about it.
I have more of a problem with you cherry picking Canada, Australia, NZ, and England, despite those countries having very little in common with the U.S. and causes for violent crime.
The U.S. falls into the category of large, moderately urbanized countries with large open borders to less industrialized countries, high wealth and wealth disparity, and ethnically diverse populations. Most of the western world is not that way at all, and those properties breed the root cause of the majority of violent crime in those countries, which is the illegal drug trade.
Countries that share those features include Russia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and China. Surprise, surprise, those other countries are all at least or much worse off then the U.S. is, despite some having the strictest gun ownership laws in the world (Russia), all having socialized healthcare, and the US. Actually having a pretty good education system for most of the country (not underserved inner-city areas) when reported the same way other countries are.
China is the outlier, in that it does not have either high violent crime rates or a violent drug trade, but my theory is that this is because the vast majority of the country lives in squalor and acts as a buffer to help shield the cities, and those cities have their crime rates dilutes by the shield.
Simple facts are that gun control reduces gun crime but increase violent crime. Education and healthcare raise the standard of living, but don't provide disincentive for crime in the drug trade. You are right about inequality as a facet of this.
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Guns don't kill people. Gun-obsessed people kill people.
(I suspect the high velocity lumps of lead may play a part too.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Exactly, which is why you always see mass shootings at gun shows, gun stores, and gun ranges where there's lot of guns, lots of ammunition, and lots of gun-obsessed people.
Thankfully, there are some places where that sort of thing isn't tolerated, like schools, malls, and US Postal offices. Ahh yes, gun-free zones, where violence is a thing of the past.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Wait a moment, are you saying that there are people who might ignore the gun-free zone signs and carry a gun anyway? What kind of person would even think of doing such a thing?
But your point is well taken. I think the best way to go is to stop everyone but the police and the military from carrying guns, just like they do in Mexico. Then we could enjoy Mexico's legendarily low violent crime rate right here in the United States.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You have no evidence for that - it's just a nice excuse to make you think that the US isn't as messed up as it is. You also seem to be woefully ill-informed of the diversity in many places in Europe which rivals (or beats) the diversity in many violence-soaked places in the US. So to recap: you are making excuses for your country based on nonsense, in some childish attempt to not have to think about the intrinsic issues in the US which makes it one of the most dangerous countries in the developed world. You do realise you, and those who think like you, are causing harm to the US, right? As you gladly dismiss any criticism as being European propaganda, ensuring the harm continues unabated, just so you can feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. You're clearly an intelligent person, so I have no idea what happened to you to skew your brain this way.
You'll never get americans to give up their guns: they're all too afraid. What are they so scared of? Yup, all the (other) people with guns. The comments about gun shops and firing ranges being the "safest" places demonstrates this very well. The gun-owners feel safest when surrounded by guns. However when they are out in the big, nasty, world they feel insecure that other people might have weapons they can't see, so the urge to protect themselves becomes very strong.
Obviously, if nobody in the USA had a gun, this level of fear should be reduced, but it's irrational and doesn't work like that. Hence they all keep their guns and that induces more fear - so they feel the need for more and bigger guns, just as a sort of "safety blanket" (as almost none of them are ever fired in the real world) - which, of course, escalates the problem.
It's all because they're all so scared of each other.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Carefully read the statitics: banker killings are counted negative, so that in Lichtenstein every non-banker murder is offset by a banker-killing. Research shows that indeed the net-effect is zero.
Damn, your parents really hated you to give you name like 'holophrastic'.
I would also point out that the "US" - commonly condemned in such statistics - is probably the least homogenous country in the world. As such, it's probably useful to look at the state by state rankings, both positively and negatively:
(ranked by deaths per 100k)
1. District of Columbia 30.8 http://www.city-data.com/forum...
-Styopa
Canada = 1.4-1.8/100k
U.S. = 4.7-6.6/100k
It's amazing how some people will defend the American way of life while being completely blind to the American way of death.
The difference is that the ethnic diversity in Europe looks different than it does in the US: in Europe, it's because of immigration. Folks generally don't cross an ocean to then shit on the society they've come to join. Sure enough there's really not that much violence in most immigrant communities in the US. I used to live in the slums of Baltimore, and finally moved to a new apartment in DC. I got to the laundry room and saw a lady in there speaking Spanish to her daughter, and thought "Alrighty, if the immigrants have come here, this is a decent place." I was right.
But the highest crime rate in the US is in the black enclaves in the inner cities. That population was never an immigrant community; it's the descendants of former slaves. We (the American whites) did horrible things to them, and then after emancipation continued to do horrible things to them in part of the country while not really doing enough to facilitate the integration of the liberated slaves and their descendants into society. By the time we passed the Civil Rights Act there were endemic social problems in the US black community, to the point that there's a long and very respectful Department of Labor study into them (the Moynihan Report).
So now in the US those black enclaves have a sky-high murder rate, and the rest of the country has a pretty low one (broadly similar to Europe's). Why? A whole constellation of historical and cultural reasons, many of them traceable back to horrid racism years ago. Should we still blame whitey for the problems? Is it slavery's fault that kids in the ghetto kill each other for silly reasons and don't want to learn to read and write? I dunno.
But saying simply "Europe has diversity too" misses the point: the non-white folks in Europe are there because they came there and wanted to be European, for the most part. (This is pretty similar to Asian-Americans, a group with a low crime rate.) That has vastly different cultural effects than hauling people's ancestors over in chains and wrecking their society.