... in the US. Anyone got comparable stats for other countries or is this another aspect of the US's unexpectedly high violence?
For the UK it was a high year, but that's partly because the ONS are counting homicide, which in this case includes the death of 39 people in the back of a lorry in Essex. (https://news.sky.com/story/essex-lorry-deaths-two-men-found-...)
So its either up 8% including these people in the back of the lorry, or 1% if you exclude it.
nowhere near the 39% quoted in OP.
"No one has been murdered in Norway so far this year"
You'll have trouble finding statistically significant trends there year-to-year, yet alone in a few months.
Further, given how culturally different those countries are, trying to compare the two would be ludicrous.
If the original post was making a comment about american culture (its "hyperviolence"), why wouldn't you compare it to a different culture? That is how comparisons work.
Sure, yes. That's how comparisons work if you'd wanted to make that kind of comparison. Or you might want to compare to similar countries where you don't have to control for so many variables.
That's why you compare the crimes commited per capita. The demographics of Norway and that of the USA is nothing alike.
So yes I was comparing per-capita. However Norway is so tiny that fluctuations of even +/- 50% year-to-year are likely to be just noise.
A tiny country may have one homicide one year, then three the next. Or as a journalist would put it: "Murders in Norway skyrocket. Up 200%."
I don't think it's a fair comparison just because absolute population is similar.
If Norway had the same homicide rate as the whole of the US in 2019 (as it doesn't seem they've release the 2020 ones yet), according to the FBI[1] the homicide rate in the US was 5.0 murders per 100,000 people. Norway has a population of 5.4 million.
So for Norway, that would have been 270.
Does that seem like a fluctuation?
You're severely misrepresenting the facts as your figures are out by two orders of magnitude.
[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-....
That's an order of magnitude off from the homicide rate of the US, which you just quoted.
Why are you even using the US' homicide rate and applying it to Norway?
because they are considered simarly developed countries, but as far as violence stats go (especially gun violence) USA is more comparable to developing countries.
But also a population 12 times larger than Norway (60 million people).
Los Angeles and Norway have a comparable population, in Los Angeles in 2020 there have been 300 homicides, a 20% increase over 2019, despite covid. It's more than the whole Italy that stopped at 271, 14% less than 2019 that ended with 315 homicides.
Los Angeles has the same size of Rome, in Rome there have been "only" 15 homicides in 2020, 20 times less than LA.
US is the outlier in the West, all the other developed countries have comparable homicide rates.
Japan has the lowest rates globally, in 2017 they had 56 times less homicides per capita than in USA.
How developed is the US really? Here's a non exhaustive list of things I and people in my surroundings think moves the US closer to a developing country like India than a developed country.
Democracy wise: Broken voting system
Technology wise: Still using insecure CC and cash only
Healthcare wise: Insurance companies ripping you off
Infrastructure wise: Fiber optics still uncommon, train system is crap
Social security: Friends and family (hopefully) only
Legal system: Carreers are on the line with big cases, so rather than getting to the truth corruption takes over big cases
Freedom: You're free to carry weapons in town that could wipe out the entire mall. (But the government has nukes and tanks, thank god you can shoot them with an assault rifle now)
Education: Only if your parents planned ahead and can afford it, never ending cycle to keep poor people poor (I know there are grants and exceptions)
Religion: Still a significant percent following the person in the clouds.
I've never been to the US, but these are things "Swedes" (My social circle) commonly joke about when talking about the US, seeing videos, news, articles from your media online.
I do realise i might come off as quite arrogant, but this is the picture the US presents, the list from above could probably quite easily be broken down by exceptions and differences between states, It's only there to reflect back what I/we see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Czech Republic: -10% murders between 2019 and 2020.
The original post contained no data about shootings, and even if US shootings were also higher my statement could still be true.
Also, these numbers have nothing to do with hospital occupancy.
That's a steep drop of context. The US doesn't have abnormally high violence overall, as your blanket statement would imply. The US has a lower rate of violent crime than Europe does and that has been consistently true for 50 years.
The US has an unexpectedly high murder rate due to the mass proliferation of easy to get handguns in its inner cities. If you remove that single factor, the US murder rate drops to something comparable to Canada. It's obvious that the murder problem in the US is a handgun problem and the stats always bear that out year after year.
> If you remove that single factor
"If you remove the murders, the US has a low murder rate" isn't helpful.
> It's obvious that the murder problem in the US is a handgun problem and the stats always bear that out year after year
Well, yes, but this runs into the "this is constitutionally guaranteed and we refuse to even contemplate doing anything about it" problem.
But the difference is huge. In the 1980s, Detroit was more lethal than Belfast, with regular bombs going off and troops shooting civilians in the streets.
The US system of policing seems to be both repressive and ineffective.
For a very specific definition of violent crime, I suppose. In the real world, homicide rates are not even close, regardless of any hand waving about guns. Same for rapes.
Crime rates are comparable if you put together robberies, assaults, murders, rapes and jaywalking, it does not mean that the rates of violent crimes are similar.
Heck, Romania is 10 times poorer than the US and it's still safer. And it's not even the safest country in Europe.
(The US seems to be ahead of most european countries.)
The OPs claims were not flippant and are easy to verify. Erhk was being lazy and trying to pin that laziness on the OP. It's the very behavior LMGTFY was invented to expose.
Demanding citations for easily checked facts is one of the primary signs of bad-faith arguing.
> Demanding citations for easily checked facts is one of the primary signs of bad-faith arguing.
Not providing facts and then expecting people to do it for you is arguing in bad faith. Particularly when it’s trivial to find sources telling that the fact-free opinion is in fact wrong.
The definition of "violent crime" in the UK covers much more than it does in the US.
Here's an old piece about it: https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checki...