TexasCHLforum.com

Much of the political thinking about violence in the United States comes from unfavorable comparisons between the United States and a series of cherry-picked countries with lower murder rates and with fewer guns per capita. We’ve all seen it many times. The United States, with a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 is compared to a variety of Western and Central European countries (also sometimes Japan) with murder rates often below 1 per 100,000. This is, in turn, supposed to fill Americans with a sense of shame and illustrate that the United States should be regarded as some sort of pariah nation because of its murder rate.

Note, however, that these comparisons always employ a carefully selected list of countries, most of which are very unlike the United States. They are countries that were settled long ago by the dominant ethnic group, they are ethnically non-diverse today, they are frequently very small countries (such as Norway, with a population of 5 million) with very locally based democracies (again, unlike the US with an immense population and far fewer representatives in government per voter). Politically, historically, and demographically, the US has little in common with Europe or Japan.

JALLEN wrote: As I point out over and over, 67.3% of statistics are misleading, and the rest of them flat wrong,

The four countries with the highest overall
prevalence victimisation rates in 2004 are Ireland, England & Wales, New
Zealand and Iceland3. Other countries with comparatively high victimisation
rates are Northern Ireland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Denmark,
Mexico, Switzerland and Belgium. All these countries have overall victimisation
rates that are statistically significantly higher than the average of
the 30 participating countries. The USA, Canada, Australia and Sweden
show rates near the average. Compared to past results, they have dropped
several places in the ranking on overall victimisation.