many of you have guns and there’s much more violence and insanity in general
Every third article in the UK is about “Knife Crime!!!” The French and German news networks make it sound like Paris and Berlin are active war zones. FFS, even the Swedes are insisting half the country is living out the plot of Taken.
Like, I’m sure the US is marginally less safe than Europe. But I suspect that has more to do with Europe just being on-average five years older than the US. By and large, both continents are extremely safe. Violence - particularly street violence - is extraordinarily rare. And the areas where it does crop up tend to be between people who know each other and having some kind of deep interpersonal dysfunction (abusive spouses / parents, school kids fighting one another over some accumulated grudge, sports hooligans brawling with their rivals).
What we have, in practice, is a handful of highly glamorized violent events (school shootings, most notably) that get international news coverage. FFS, we spend more time covering shootings in the US than we do covering our active military campaigns abroad.
The US has five(!) times the murders per capita than France, Germany or the UK.
Sure, a lot of that is probably gang violence, or isolated big events like school shootings.
But just let that fact sink in. Per capita, there are five times as many murders in the US than those “rough” countries the MAGA crows warns of. It’s not marginally less safe, it is a whole different league. The US is in between South American or African borderline third-world countries [1] in terms of murders per citizen.
[1]: Granted, murders are probably more often reported and counted in the US than in Angola or Kenia. But still, that we even have to have this argument…
France is at around 1.3, Germany at around 0.9, UK somewhere in between, if a quick search is to be trusted.
And I think change in incidence is a weird way to express this. Yes, the average person is not likely to die of homicide, even in “unsafe” countries. But at the same time, the chance of a man to get testicular cancer is around 0.01%; if I would be 5 times as likely to get testicular cancer than the people from other places, I would very much want to look into that.
Every third article in the UK is about “Knife Crime!!!” The French and German news networks make it sound like Paris and Berlin are active war zones. FFS, even the Swedes are insisting half the country is living out the plot of Taken.
Like, I’m sure the US is marginally less safe than Europe. But I suspect that has more to do with Europe just being on-average five years older than the US. By and large, both continents are extremely safe. Violence - particularly street violence - is extraordinarily rare. And the areas where it does crop up tend to be between people who know each other and having some kind of deep interpersonal dysfunction (abusive spouses / parents, school kids fighting one another over some accumulated grudge, sports hooligans brawling with their rivals).
What we have, in practice, is a handful of highly glamorized violent events (school shootings, most notably) that get international news coverage. FFS, we spend more time covering shootings in the US than we do covering our active military campaigns abroad.
The US has five(!) times the murders per capita than France, Germany or the UK.
Sure, a lot of that is probably gang violence, or isolated big events like school shootings.
But just let that fact sink in. Per capita, there are five times as many murders in the US than those “rough” countries the MAGA crows warns of. It’s not marginally less safe, it is a whole different league. The US is in between South American or African borderline third-world countries [1] in terms of murders per citizen.
[1]: Granted, murders are probably more often reported and counted in the US than in Angola or Kenia. But still, that we even have to have this argument…
Roughly 5.75 per 100,000 people/year, versus 1.33 per 100,000. So closer to 4x. But even then, we’re talking about a 0.04% change in incidence.
A bit like saying you’re 5x as likely to win the lottery.
France is at around 1.3, Germany at around 0.9, UK somewhere in between, if a quick search is to be trusted.
And I think change in incidence is a weird way to express this. Yes, the average person is not likely to die of homicide, even in “unsafe” countries. But at the same time, the chance of a man to get testicular cancer is around 0.01%; if I would be 5 times as likely to get testicular cancer than the people from other places, I would very much want to look into that.
Okay, but that’s it. Full stop. Minor variations don’t say much about these countries.
Then the risk is still microscopic, especially with the variance by neighborhood and income and circumstance.