Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

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Why compare the US to Europe? The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia. It has the homicide rate you would expect if you averaged the homicide rates for these continents - roughly 5 per 100,000, which is the global average.

People have this schizophrenic notion that the US should have the demographics of Brazil but the homicide rate of Sweden, and that aint gonna happen no matter what kind of gun control laws you pass. Same thing for measures of corruption, etc.

So you have nations with very low homicide rates, like Bangladesh, versus nations with high homicide rates, like Nigeria or Brazil or Jamaica. And the gun control laws don't seem to make much of a difference in comparison to ethnicity. Looking at Europe, you have wide variations in gun ownership rates but a fairly low homicide rate across the board. Looking at US states, again wide variations of gun ownership rates not well correlated to homicide rates. So stop pretending that the high homicide rates in the US, which are accounted for in urban centers are because of loose gun control laws in DC or Chicago. The US has exactly the homicide rate you'd expect just by using WHO intentional homicide rates per continent and comparing that to US demographics.

> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.

Yes. Everyone knows African Americans have more in common with Africans than Americans. Asian Americans are a monolith, and so is Asia. And Latin Americans speak Latin. Sigh.

Yeah, this reads kind of like an early-1900s scientist going on about skull shapes. There are cultural reasons why "We ain't Europe" is true, but they can't be broken down to percentages of ethnicities.

> Why compare the US to Europe?

Why wouldn't we compare the US to other places with similar GDP per capita?

> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.

I'm not sure if you're trying to claim that people commit violent crimes at different rates based on their genetic makeup, or if you're you trying to claim that multicultural societies lead to more violent crime, but both claims are preposterous.

London and Singapore are giant multicultural melting pots, and tremendously safe. Even New York City is safer than many major European cities. (Really, look it up.)

Violent crime in city is the result of poor drug policy more than anything, not the city's ethnic demographics, nor gun laws.

GDP is a bad predictor of living conditions. Consider also that most EU police will never be victims of assault, let alone with a weapon like a knife or a gun. With or without guns, there is a higher tendency for violence in some places in the US, even though it's been decreasing steadily.

I think violent crime is more a result of large economic inequality, and the US loves to breed poverty. Brazil, for example, is also a country with a lot of economic inequality. And economic inequality can be the result of having many different ethnicities, combined with racism.

The test here would be to compare the violent crime rate in cities with high ethnic diversity and high economic inequality, with cities with high diversity but low inequality. Or low diversity but high inequality.

Thank you, that has given me a new train of thought to ride.

It's an important factor to consider. Just because you copy, say, the legislative system of Switzerland isn't going to give you Swiss outcomes. There was a story about some Latin American nations trying to copy Swedish style practices and it turned out an absolute disaster. In Japan, if you leave a cell phone in a coffee shop, you can come back hours later and it will be given to you. In Russia, not so much. In the 80s there was an effort -- the early shoots of globalism -- of trying to "industrialize" west Africa by trying to import Western European-style management and business practices, and all of these projects failed, and some resulted in large debt loads being carried. One wonders what could have happened if they just let Africa be Africa and develop its own industries with its own practices at its own pace. You are not going to get English property rights or rule of law, but you will get something that actually works in the local environment, which is more important, IMO.

> Why compare the US to Europe?

Because we want to compare the US to places that people find comparable and desirable and, gosh, maybe even slightly superior, rather than places that people find to be totally undesirable.

We also would like to compare the US to places that might have statisitical similarity. A good example of this is Canada: lots of people claim cause/effect in the US for laws about underage drinking, yet Canada had a similar decrease in underage drinking without changing any of their laws. This contradicts those who claim that public policy changes were responsible.

In addition, European countries help show that sometimes there are other solutions than just "more guns". And, what some of the fallout from BLM changes is showing is that disarming initial responders rather than always just sending in armed police seems to result in positive results to the system.

We look to Europe because sometimes they are exemplars and that while maybe we shouldn't blindly just do what they do, perhaps we might want to think about and emulate what they do right.

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