Here is an interesting statistic. When we look solely at murder, not rape, assault, etc., but just murder statistics prove very different. In 2010, the United States had a murder rate substantially lower than places like Honduras, Mexico, and other violent nations.
But we do not like to compare to those nations because there are obvious reasons for many of the high murder rates; poverty, drugs, civil strife. Instead, the comparisons inevitably return to America versus the United Kingdom. This is for obvious reasons. But let’s take the most important violent crime and separate it out because this is the easiest differentiation between the two nations.
The U.K. does have a higher ‘violent crime’ rate, that is related almost entirely to the manner in which the term ‘violent crime’ is defined in each country. Using that statistic is meaningless because things like shoplifting would be considered a ‘violent crime’ according to the UK reporting criteria.
Murder, however, is murder. It is the same in both nations. So, what do to the numbers look like? In the United States in 2010, the murder rate was 4.8 murders per 100,000 residents. In the UK, during the same time frame, the murder rate was 1.2 per 100,000 residents. Staggering difference. Don’t let the rhetoric fool you – America is not a safer place to live than most of the other industrialized nations on the planet, it is less so. There are over 105 nations with lower murder rates including (obviously) all of the EU nations, Mozambique, Chile, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Canada, Qatar, Kuwait, and Japan.
Sorry if this does not fit your thoughts – but these are the facts. America is the most violent of ‘civilized’ nations.
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