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Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

>What you listed for the past 10 years in Belgium is an average week in Chicago.

Wait a second friend, first you claim "basically no crime, no guns", then when confronted with the facts, instead of taking accountability and correcting, you move the goalposts to some high-crime US city.

I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons, but if we were to keep the discussion in good faith and stick to comparisons with EU cities, my eastern european city has literally zero crime and guns making Belgium look like a warzone by comparison.

We have literally zero people killed by suicide explosives, guns or machetes compared to Brussels. How can people look at those crimes and go like "yeah, it's not so bad, you only have a relatively small chance of being killed" ?

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> Wait a second friend, first you claim "basically no crime, no guns", then when confronted with the facts, instead of taking accountability and correcting, you move the goalposts to some high-crime US city.

OP is right, if those are the worst things to happen in the past 12 years, that's effectively 0 crime.

Especially when you consider that so much of what you listed were actually terrorists attacks conducted by an organization that hasn't conducted a foreign terror attack since winning control of their own territory from foreign occupiers.

>OP is right, if those are the worst things to happen in the past 12 years, that's effectively 0 crime.

If that's "zero crime" from your frame of reference, then what are the cities that have actual zero crime? -1000 crime? NaN?

I'd also be curious to know, if for example you or a family member would have been a victim in one of those violent incidents that don't happen in other EU cities, if you'd still have considered it "zero crime".

Is it one of those cases that when people see so much violent crime it's just a statistic that they had waive it easily? Because I can't.

As a passerby, I'm honestly not sure what pedantic hill you think you're dying on.

Basically no crime was pretty obvious.

>Basically no crime was pretty obvious.

Then please argument using logic why it's obvious. I explained why it isn't oblivions, as per HN rules.

Subjectively sure, each to his own, it might be obvious to you if you're ideologically aligned with the poster, but for good faith debate, you'll need to add actual arguments to convince the other people of your take. Imagine telling the judge "it's obvious your honor" as your only argument to why you're in the right.

>As a passerby, I'm honestly not sure what pedantic hill you think you're dying on.

No hill dying here, I'm just pushing for facts over blind ideologies.

You're arguing like an automaton, when most people live in the real world where language has nuance and context.

The post you replied to wasn't written in math or C, so you're trying to objectively disprove a qualitative statement.

In short: https://www.wheatonslaw.com/

I meant compared to the US it has basically no crime. Total gun incidents in the US is 10x more than Belgium.

And yes obviously there are guns in Belgian society but with no guns I was referring to how regular people don't walk around with guns. If you play football and your ball enters someone yard you don't have to worry about getting shot.

These days in the US you need to worry about getting disappeared by a parallel police force.

> I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons

I believe their point was that Brussels is “super safe” compared to Chicago. 67 times fewer gun incidents is quite a lot.

I live in Dublin, Ireland, which is a lot smaller than Brussels, and when there is a shooting it gets on the news. You can imagine how amused I was coming from São Paulo that a full-on gang war was going on when I arrived here and 4 people had been shot in the previous year.

A friend of mine who also came from São Paulo, a trauma surgeon, had to change specialty here because there simply isn’t enough work.

People need to take the name Chicago out of their mouths. If a message board thread is a poker game, bet the bank when someone tries to make a political argument using "Chicago" that they've never set foot here. Someone who grew up in Brussels would be approximately as safe in Chicago as they would anywhere in the United States --- less safe than in Brussels, because of overall automobile and firearms deaths in America, but no less safe than in any major city.

(In fact, your life expectancy in Cook County is several years higher than in the rural south.)

The gun violence in Chicago is tightly constrained to places and populations unfamiliar to the median Belgian. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and structurally segregated by almost a century of redlining and "urban renewal" that created hyperconcentrated pockets of crime. It's a human tragedy and fully worth dunking on, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how safe a visitor would be to the city.

(Chicago is also not even in the top 10 in US cities by index crimes, but whatever).

Like I argumented before, comparisons with random high crime cities across the pond are in bad faith, which is why i proposed sticking only to EU cities to make the comparison fair, and Brussels does fairly bad at that level.

If you insist to go this route, you can definitely find cities even in the US with less violent crime than Brussels.

Why is comparing major cities in the US on a thread about someone leaving the US for Brussels bad faith?

Because it ignores the fact a white European, the vast vast majority of Belgium, won't actually experience that kind of homicide rate in the USA if you pluck them out of Belgium and dumped them there.

If you look at places in US with similar white European demographics (New Hampshire at <2 per 100k) the homicide rate isn't that much worse than Belgium (~1.2 per 100k).

The best predictor of being a victim of violence in the USA is to be black, the ~second best predictor is to be in a state with a high proportion of black people. If you are in a state that is ~as white as Belgium, the rate goes way way down.

Well said. After reading your comment and ruminating on it a bit, I think people handwaive the violent crime in Brussels since native Belgians (and possibly other well off immigrants) aren't very likely to live in Brussels city that's only 22% native Belgian and 78% foreign born.

I expect small cities and towns in the suburbs, where native Belgians are a majority, to have virtually zero violent crime, which would flatten out the crime spike of Brussels into good looking national averages.

Thanks I see your point there, though the school shooting reply above is the opposite from what I can gather.

Do you think Chicago is an outlier compared to other large cities in the US? Would you like to provide a comparison including other large cities?

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