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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

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.

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.