Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, how many styles of haircut are you legally allowed in the USA? Can you leave if you want to? Can you criticise the government without you and your family being shot?

Never mind Apples and Oranges, you’re comparing a rabid kitten (NK: you don’t want to be a cell inside it, but the animal is containable) with a healthy chimpanzee in the jungle you’re walking though (USA: violent and acts like it owns the place, so being one of its cells is safer than being a cell in many of the things around it).

View on HN

Good answer, but hyronically in USA you have 6 chances in 100 thousands to be murdered, in NK it's 6 in a million.

Looks like the chimpanzee cells are not safer after all.

What’s your source? Wikipedia puts their intentional homicide rates at 4.96 and 4.40 per 100k respectively.

Homicide rate in NK (4.4 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/intentional-homicides-per...

Homicide rates from firearms NK (0.11 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...

Homicide rate in USA (6.1 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate?tab=chart&s...

Homicide rates from firearms USA (4.63 / 100k)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...

So USA is more dangerous than NK in general and the chances of getting shot and killed (quoting "Can you criticise the government without you and your family being shot?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032711) are 42 times worse in USA than in NK.

It means that for every person shot and killed in NK there are 42 in USA.

I was wrong anyway, it's not 6 chances in 1 million but ~1 chance in a million to get shot and killed in NK.

Compare it now to some other western country, for example Italy, my country:

homicide rate: 0.7 / 100k

homicide rate by firearms: 0.3 / 100k

Italy is quite average for the west, all the other western countries have similar stats, more or less.

What's wrong with the US?

Ah, you’re referring to murder specifically by guns yet regardless of motivation.

Yeah, no. The figure here would be for those executed by the state for political crimes, though that will be hard to measure in both cases and I’d prefer to include in that count things like “unlawfully killed by cops who didn’t like you because you uncovered evidence of systematic racism” because I feel de-facto truths are more important than de-jure claims.

Then you get messy things like prison labour, and systematic policies of punishing entire communities for crimes (or protests) of a few from that community, and I don’t even know if you’re able to demonstrate any of these without being piled on by people defending any given example as unrelated/justified/propaganda/all of the above.

In fairness to you, this is a lot messier than my original comment. :)

> yet regardless of motivation.

Regardless of the motivation USA is more dangerous than Somalia (4.31/100k) - of course there are other reasons to be scared there,being killed is only one among many - but still it is kinda bad IMO.

If we count, for example, people killed by the police, there have been 1,004 killings in USA in 2019, 3 every million, 34 every 10 million residents. compared to Germany, whose police is said to be quite violent, it's 30 times more (Germany is around 1 per 10 million residents) and 170 times worse than Japan (0.2 per 10 millions)

All in all, as much as I know numbers don't tell the whole truth, something needs to change over there .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com