5 ms·

The rest of the world has no clue what's going on with you guys. Seems like you have no clue either. Canadians (an many other nations) have guns, but no gun pro

• adventured 5y ago
  The vast majority of the US has a murder rate comparable to Canada in fact, while having a huge number of guns. Last year Chicago's so called top cop said the city has over 117,000 gang members that are part of 55 known gangs. That's merely one example, a few dozen other cities are similarly buried in homicides and gangs. If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year).
  • speedgoose 5y ago
    If you cherry pick the data, you can have good numbers indeed.
  • laputan_machine 5y ago
    Per 100k people, the US has 3 times the murder rate of Canada. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Canada/United-States/Crime https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Canada/Uni... Edit: changed from 23 times to 3 times.
    • adventured 5y ago
      edit: parent changed their comment from claiming the US had a murder rate 23 times that of Canada --- False. Canada has a murder rate typically 1.5 to 2 per year (per 100k). The US murder rate is typically closer to 5. In 2019 there were an estimated 16,000 murders in the US (~4.8 per 100,000). From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada "After dropping to a low point of 1.44 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013, Canada's homicide rate has been rising again.[6] In 2015 the rate rose to 1.68 per 100,000 people, up from 1.47 the previous year.[7] According to Statistics Canada data from 2016, police reported 611 homicides across Canada in 2016, a rate of 1.68 per 100,000 people.[8] Canada's national homicide rate 2017 was the highest it's been in a decade, Statistics Canada says, because of a spike in gang-related violence and shootings. The agency said there were 660 reported homicides in Canada last year. Not only was that an increase of nearly eight per cent from 2016, it also pushed up the homicide rate to 1.8 victims for every 100,000 people, the highest since 2009"
      • laputan_machine 5y ago
        You're right, it's 'only' 3 times more, not 23 times more (per 100k).
    • nine_k 5y ago
      Not 23, but 2.5. 23 times is the absolute number, which is easy to explany with the differences of population.
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      When making such a substantive edit (from 23x to 3x), it seems appropriate to disclose the edit.
      • laputan_machine 5y ago
        That's fair
    • okamiueru 5y ago
      Not that it really matters to anything, but the term is usually "Per capita" or per unit of population. It doesn't matter if it's per 100k, 200k, etc.
  • grokys 5y ago
    > If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year). Gun control, you mean?
    • busymom0 5y ago
      Stop letting them use gun control to ignore the underlying issues in the community. ME: Chicago has strict gun control but high gun violence. THEM: They get guns from states with loose gun control. ME: But those states don't have the same gun violence THEM: Places in Chicago are poor & neglected so there's more violence. ME: BINGO, it's a socioeconomic issue not a gun issue! This site tracks Chicago specifically: https://heyjackass.com https://heyjackass.com 2020: 456 Homicides, 1,902 Wounded 2021 so far 6 months in: 378 Homicides, 1727 wounded, 2082 shot Until the gang problem gets solved, nothing will change. And politicians are too busy disarming the law abiding citizens and cutting police budgets instead of focusing on the illegal gang problem.
      • weavie 5y ago
        Maybe it's both.
      • onion2k 5y ago
        ME: BINGO, it's a socioeconomic issue not a gun issue! It could be both.
        • cousin_it 5y ago
          It's not both. The root cause of most of these killings is honor culture, which existed in plenty of societies before guns and led to just as many killings.
      • ec109685 5y ago
        Chicago gun control laws were ruled unconstitutional, so there is no longer strict gun control there: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/03/sarah-huckabee-sanders/chicago-toughest-gun-control-claim-shot-full-holes/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/03/sarah-huck...
  • papito 5y ago
    Visiting/exchange doctors come here to pick up skills for combat zones because so many ER trauma shifts are going to have gun shot wounds. And if it's the work of the untouchable assault rifle, well, you are going to be learnin', boy!
  • test_epsilon 5y ago
    Outside these gangs, what is the murder rate like though? Surely still many times higher than Canada or Europe with all the rednecks and white supremacists and school shooters.
    • AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
      Actually, if remove gang related killings, the US gun murder rate is remarkably low.
      • kwhitefoot 5y ago
        It is in other countries too. What was your point?
      • test_epsilon 5y ago
        How low is remarkable, exactly? I can't really believe that.
  • kmm 5y ago
    If you're excluding the most violent areas in the US in your comparison, shouldn't you do the same for Canada as well?
    • adventured 5y ago
      I'm not excluding. There's no point in attempting to do that here on HN, I seriously doubt anybody here fails to at least vaguely understand the condition of US inner cities: they're war zones. The point is obvious: highly elevated rates of murder in the US are particularly hyper concentrated to a small number of urban zones, to a very abnormal degree. The high US murder rate isn't a comprehensive problem spanning all national population centers. You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though, they shout you down and or run away from it. You want proof of that? Normalize the murder rate for cities like Chicago, Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis, etc. to that of NYC or San Diego or Seattle or Austin TX circa 2019. Watch how the US murder rate dramatically plunges overall. St Louis had a 65 per 100k murder rate in 2019. Baltimore was 58. Birmingham was 50. Detroit was 41. Those are war zones. Kansas City and Memphis were 29. A city like eg Pittsburgh also has serious problems, but it's at least down at 12 (still high by any sane standard). If you reduce the high US murder cities down to just that (ridiculous) ceiling, you'd drop the US murder rate by a lot. Again, concentration is the obvious point, and it's very easy to prove. The obvious question is: what's being done to improve those high murder concentration areas? Not much is the answer. You can also see this concentration fact in action easily by comparing sections of Chicago or Baltimore, to the overall city murder rates, or the overall state murder rates (for IL or MD). It's not subtle, it's an extreme variance, far beyond what you see in eg Amsterdam vs the Netherlands or Toronto vs Ontario or Canada. It's not normal at all. The way people try to live in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago or Baltimore, is by entirely avoiding the extraordinarily dangerous areas. If it can be avoided people simply never go to those neighborhoods, they don't drive through there. They're de facto war zones, occupied territory owned by gangs, and everybody knows it (including the police). And this is the point that absolutely nobody at a high political level in the US wants to discuss, even though to fix the US murder problem you have to start talking about it. How to fix the US inner cities, which are in terrifying condition. You only ultimately fix the inner cities in the US through dramatic concentrated economic improvement, and looking back over the past several decades, neither party has done much of anything about it (the results of that are right there staring at us every day).
  • wongarsu 5y ago
    In large parts of the US you can get away with things that any other country would call murder or manslaughter, just by claiming that you were frightened or fearing for your life.
• ekianjo 5y ago
  Single variable comparisons are always super helpful to have adult discussions.
  • hughrr 5y ago
    Well it's approximately 4.5 years of shooting deaths in the UK in one day. Regardless of how you look at it, America has a serious problem.
    • nly 5y ago
      Annual deaths per capita would be more helpful
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        I agree, though I’d also exclude suicides (or break them out separately at a minimum).
        • okamiueru 5y ago
          I did so for you in a sibling comment.
      • okamiueru 5y ago
        https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death... Per 100k --- Total US 12.21, UK: 0.23 53 times higher. --- Homicides US 4.46, UK: 0.06 74 times higher. --- Suicides US 7.32, UK: 0.15 49 times higher.
    • amarshall 5y ago
      Huh? The data here isn’t for one day, it’s for three days. Further, population differences will massively inflate absolute numbers. You’re making it seem like US is ~1,600x UK when in fact per capita it’s ~61x [1]. Yes, this is still a lot and terrible, but you’re making it seem two orders of magnitude worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
• ourculture 5y ago
  That’s just how we express our emotions in this country. It would be racist to suggest otherwise.
• DontTellAnyone 5y ago
  It's specifically the black community driving violent crime rates up to insane levels in the US. Canada only has a ~2% black population and many of them are skilled immigrants that immigrated in the past couple of decades. I guess if you're still clueless as to why all of this is happening you should read up on human biodiversity and the effects of genes on human behavior.
• busymom0 5y ago
  Comparing US to Canada is asinine. Canada has extremely low population density in all cities and population of 1/10th of US. US also has the third-highest population in the world. Look at the population density of the 10 highest dense municipalities in Canada (highest is 5,492.6 people per square kilometre in Vancouver, B.C.): https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/170208/t001a-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/170208/t001a... Now compare it to USA. Top 50 cities amongst them all are ALL signifiantly higher than the Canadian numbers. New York City alone is 10,431.1 people per square kilometre, San Francisco is 6,658.9, Boston is 5,143.4): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... Canada also doesn't share borders with cartels nor do they have a gang problem like places like Chicago, Baltimore etc do. Considering these factors, the 420+ million guns in US are pretty safe for vast majority. As someone pointed out "The Chicago MSA is just under 3% of the US population, and about 25% of the shootings." EDIT: Why the downvotes? Do people really think comparing 2 countries with completely different population density and borders is a valid comparison?
  • simonh 5y ago
    Where do you think the US, or significant parts of it with high gun violence rates should be compared to?
    • injb 5y ago
      Why should the whole country be compared to anywhere though? The idea (implicitly) is that it gives you a sense of what it's like to live in the US. But no one lives in the whole country. People live in a particular area, usually one state (out of 50). Even then, most people's lives are largely limited to one or two counties. The reason that most Americans are not concerned with this kind of thing is that the vast majority of them are not exposed to this violence at all. For most Americans, life is extremely safe and peaceful.
      • simonh 5y ago
        Perhaps you missed the part of my post where I said "or significant parts of it with high gun violence rates".
• fouc 5y ago
  To be honest, Canadians have way less guns & stronger gun control.
  • livinginfear 5y ago
    The raw data actually paints another picture entirely. As other posts here have hinted at, the incidence of gun violence in America is not evenly close to being evenly distributed geographically across the country. If you were to compare (legal) gun ownership and gun crime statistics between America's urban areas versus everywhere else you'd see the opposite picture emerge. It's not people in backwater towns with a shed full of guns responsible for America's gun crime problem. It's gang members in the large cities.
    • cies 5y ago
      I suspect its all about extreme inequality and a violent culture (wars, polarization, 2 party system).
• shrubble 5y ago
  The intersection of Jane and Finch in Toronto...?
• swiley 5y ago
  Canada has their own issues, their government effectively lost its mind last year. Maybe forcing everyone to take planes to enter the country will make the northern shore prime real estate though. Maybe they're behaving rationally and just have a very long term goal.