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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

The point being made is that you're cutting out the bad parts in the US in order to make the comparison, but not cutting out the bad parts in the comparitor. Rural murder rate in the US is less than combined rural + urban murder rate elsewhere? Quelle surprise.

Similarly, by cutting out the urban parts of the US in your comparison, you're cutting out 70% of the US population.

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However, I don't think you need to cut out 70 % of the US population out to make a difference. More like 1-2 %?

Take out some areas of St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago and a few other places, and the numbers look very different.

Of course other countries also have their bad places, but I think the U.S. is much more split to good and bad areas than most developed nations.

Take a look at this state-by-state breakdown of the murder rates in the US:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...

Every single state is above the UK's murder rate of 0.9.

But differences between states are quite significant. New Hampshire is at 0.9 some years. Louisiana is 10-15 times that.

Still, I understand the divide is more between urban core/suburban+rural that between different states.

Well, given that state breakdown, I think the right conclusion is that there are simply more murders in the US than other developed countries across the board, no matter how you slice it.

Well, I somewhat disagree about that. State-level slicing is a reasonable approach because then the units of comparison are typically more similar in size. And there are several U.S. states (New Hampshíre, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine) that have a lower homicide rate than Belgium, Lichtenstein, Taiwan or Estonia.

(Yes, comparing rather marginal differences.)

However, Venezuela is on a completely different level. Moreover, murder rates in the US are heading downwards; they are half of 1980's numbers. Venezuela is radically up, almost ten times of 1980's numbers.

Imagine you broke down Belgium, etc the same way the US is broken down by state. You'd get even lower murder rates in many areas of Belgium, that would make the safest areas of the US look dangerous by comparison.

Face it, the US done fucked up.

"Done fucked up"? In what sense? You appear to have some action in mind.

If you break down Belgium to parts that are similar in size to U.S. states, you end up with one Belgium.

(However, breaking up Belgium brings to mind some controversies: the motto of the country is "Einigkeit macht stark" or "Unity makes Strength"; after the 2010 election (June 13, 2010) it took 541 days of negotiations to come up with a functional government (sworn in on December 6, 2011).

Right, so you just don't get it.

I had a peruse through http://www.city-data.com earlier, and most of the cities I thought of looking at were higher than that 3.9 - only Portland and NYC (oddly) matched it. Denver was 5ish. Dallas 9ish. SF 5. LA 6. Nashville 6. Boston 8. While I didn't go exhaustive, it was enough to establish the trend. I imagine Salt Lake City would be lower than the national rate, but most of the cities were above it - certainly more population than 1-2%.

Get into the cities perceived as high crime (chicago, philly, dc...) and you get 15s and up - nawlins was 40!

And still.... the figure for Venezuela is 64 (per 100 000 pop.). And that is the whole country. Caracas is much, much worse.

Until late 1980's the Venezuelan murder rate was below 10. It was actually lower than United States. Since then, the U.S. has improved a lot, and Venezuela has collapsed, particularly quickly during Maduro's time but that is merely a consequence of Chavez's "Bolivarian" policies.

(I personally think they are giving a bad name to Simon Bolivar.)

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