Originally Posted by
steve52086
Technically right, but your argument is deeply flawed. You can't just simply say, "There are more crimes in the US than the UK, the US must be doing it wrong." First, you specifically said RATE, not NUMBER. Second, you are only looking at murders, not violent crimes (murder, assault w/deadly weapon, rape, robbery) as a whole. The common thread with violent crimes is that there is a weapon and/or force used against you directly, not just property.
The common metric for this is crimes per 100,000 people. There are just under 57 million people in the UK as of 2009. There are 308 million people in the US as of 2010. In the UK in 2009, the most recent year stats are available, there were 2034 violent crimes per 100,000 people, which was 1,158,957. Again, in comparison, the same year, the US had 432 violent crimes per 100,000 people according to the DoJ. That's a total of 1,326,240 violent crimes. Look at those numbers again… under 200,000 more violent crimes in the US than the UK, but almost SIX times the number of people.
If you still want to look only at murders, I can't argue with you, but you're willfully ignoring the other three types of gun/weapon crimes, so there's no point trying to argue it in the first place, but the numbers are 755 murders in the UK 2007, or 1 per 75,500 people; 16,929 murders in the US 2007, or 1 per 18,000 people.
Are you more likely to be killed in the US than the UK? Yes. Are you more likely to be attacked with some weapon in the US than the UK? No. 1 in 59 people in the UK are attacked each year; 1 in 227 people in the US are attacked each year.
Speaking to my brother, who got sliced by a kitchen knife in a fight, he still doesn't have full range of motion back in his right arm after 4 years, and has nightmares of the fight most nights. People don't think about the trauma of surviving so much as not surviving, but both are called violent crimes, and considered equally serious because the consequences are just as bad if you survive, as if you don't. He will have medical bills and reduced capacity to work, play games like WoW, or even just to type, for the rest of his life. At least once a week he says out loud that he wished he didn't walk away from that fight. Is he any less damaged than the person who actually didn't walk away?