Daryl_Blonder wrote:
This is why I get really annoyed with people are arrogantly insist that the USA is "the greatest country in the world." We have one of the highest crime rates in the industrialized world. When you look at America as a whole, a great deal of it is very dangerous. With all the people being murdered, robbed, raped, and assaulted in our cities-- and no real campaign to do anything about it-- we have a long way to go before we can rightfully claim the "greatest country" title.
America is far from having the highest crime rate in the developed world. For overall crime, the latest statistics I have are from 2000 from the UN, and the US was 5th in the developed world behind New Zealand, Finland, Denmark, the UK. Holland was 6th and not far behind us. For murder with a firearm, the last figures I have are 2006 from the UN and we were 4th behind South Africa, Thailand, and Mexico. All 3 have a small fraction of the firearm ownership of the US. Other countries relatively high gun ownership such as Finland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Canada, and New Zealand, and Israel have significantly lower rates of firearm homicides than even many more restrictive countries. I'd tend to think that Russia would have a higher rate of murders with a firearm homicide rate than the US but I don't see them listed anywhere. The US is actually below the UN's estimated average homicide rate worldwide. As of 2009, El Salvador has 71 murders per 100,000 people. South Africa has 34, Brazil has 22, North Korea has 19, and Russia and Mexico have 15. The US has 5.
Find where the poor minorities live, find where the biggest drug neighborhoods are at, and check the time of day most of the problems happen, and you find that the problem is far from uniform in our society, but rather, it happens in hot spots, and it is by far mostly people involved in some form of criminal activity or associate with people that are.
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"Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars."
- Unknown
"A fear of weapons is a sign of ret*d sexual and emotional maturity."
-Sigmund Freud
13 Sep 2011, 4:42 am
