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Comment by ellyagg | Hacker News Reader

Last year, New Hampshire's murder rate was 1.3. Since 1996, like Iceland, its murder rate has never gone above 1.8. New Hampshire is four times as big as Iceland. Why is violent crime so rare in New Hampshire?

[http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...]

Not that New Hampshire is unique. There are other states larger than Iceland that have similarly low murder rates.

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A couple of the major reasons the article puts forward also apply to New Hampshire. First, we have lots of guns here. In fact our state's constitution requires the state to give a concealed carry permit to anyone who passes a background check and sends in the form with $10.

Since gun ownership has a controversial effect on crime, perhaps a more compelling reason is that we only have 2 major cities in NH. And neither of them are really big enough to have an "inner city". We have one of the lowest GINI coefficients (a measure of income inequality) in the nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...

In comparison with other countries this is still a relatively high value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have thrown in income equality. I meant to emphasize that most of the people live in similarly sparse environments. It's not like we have remote farmers and people who live their whole lives in a city who never meet the likes of each other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry

Could the weather have anything to do with it?

Could also be partly the lack of tourists or type of tourists, compared to warmer areas.

Boston is less than 2 hours' drive from New Hampshire and has plenty of violence.

I think New Hampshire's cities are small and just don't really have ghettos the way most large American cities do. The violence happens in bigger cities that are pretty nearby, but happen to be outside NH's borders. Southern NH is kind of like an extended suburb of Boston.

Mass has very little gun violence, in fact, ~ 3.1 per 100k. "Plenty of violence" isn't a helpful statement.

OK, so now we get to play "compared to what?"

OP is about murder rate, not gun violence rate.

(2011): National rate: 4.7 Northeast rate: 3.9 MA rate: 2.8 NH rate: 1.3

MA's rate is lower than the national average and lower than the Northeast regional average, but more than double than NH's average.

My argument is that NH has a particularly low murder rate because it doesn't really have any big cities--the populated areas are mostly suburban. High murder rates correlate with high population density (and poverty). If the nearby metropolis of Boston were inside NH's borders, then I think NH would have the higher murder rate. Do you disagree with that assessment?

Actually NH has a substantial tourist industry. Mainly for fall foliage and lots of accessible day-trip mountain hiking.

Also during the summer. There are lots of people with vacation homes there.

Violence has more to do with how poor people are and whether there are gangs in the area.

I personally think northern countries have less crime because you can't survive alone in the cold. His anecdote about the stranger picking him up should have been a clue.

People in a critical situation tend to help each other more and when you are in an hostile environment 6 to 8 months a year, it tends to grow on you.

I agree the Cold weather has to do a lot with the behaviour of the people. Also Iceland is one of the Ten Least Crowded Places in the World.

Yes, but...

"With a population of 200,852, Greater Reykjavík comprises over 60% of the population of Iceland in an area that is only just over 1% of the total size of the country."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area

It's proximity to Canadian latitudes. The nearer you get to Canada in the USA, consistently you get better educational outcomes and crime rates.

The obvious solution to our social problems in America is to move all the low achievers to be near the Canadian border.

Detroit is about as close as you can get (geographically) to Canada.

I hear Buffalo, NY has a pretty high violent crime rate as well.

Congratulations, you won today's "reply to a statistical generalization with a single outlying datapoint/anecdote" no-prize! Write in for your fabulous reward.

And 100 HN points to you for spotting the fallacy! Well done, but you don't really believe the suggestion that after controlling for all else, closeness to Canada ends up being correlated with educational outcomes and crime rates, do you? It's obviously a joke.

I think that if you really control for all else like ethnicity, it would go away, but to condition on that much would miss the point.

Perhaps better to say, "Windsor is as close as you can get (geographically) to Detroit".

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