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Comment by i_love_liberals | Hacker News Reader

Do you know that Mexico has a law against murder? Curious if you know how many people, specifically in Mexico, specifically in Mexico city follow that and other laws?

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Some quick googling says 35k murders in 2019 for a population of about 9M. So, in mexico city, over 99.5% of the population follows the law that says you can't murder people. Not sure what your point is.

That's for the whole of Mexico, so more than an order of magnitude off (120 million). Still an insane number of murders, what a tragedy.

That's 30 per 100,000, which is less than several U.S. cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate Though, there are alot of Mexican cities on that list. And the only countries of comparable size that have a higher murder rate are Venezuela (30m) and South Africa (60m): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... (Interestingly, arguably it's Central America and the Caribbean that stand out for their high murder rates, not any specific country in the region, which suggests a more complex phenomenon than straight US-funded cartel violence.)

Ah good catch. Thanks. So we're looking at >99.9% of the population not committing murders.

Doesn't that stat just mean that >99.9% of population has not been murdered. It says nothing to the number of people doing the murdering. It could be a single individual on a massive serial spree, or an individual murder per killing which I find just as unlikely. The point is, your stat isn't stating what you think it is

The calculation above is putting an upper limit on the number of murderers (probably, that's discounting groups of participants in murders, but I'm fine with that as serial murderers are far more common than murder groups)

35k murders is a lot of fucking murders.

Yes, but to put it in context, heart disease and diabetes cause a lot more deaths [1] and obesity has been shown to increase the risk of those conditions.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/960030/mexico-causes-dea....

I believe you are committing the logical fallacy of "Whataboutery" [1] here.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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