I admit it. I’m one of those people, who seem to be rare, who simply doesn’t care what other countries think of us here in the U.S.
That’s an unpopular point of view, especially from those on the political left who seem to be obsessed with comparing the U.S. to other countries and who desperately want to remake the U.S. into European culture.
I think, quite frankly, that if they want to live in a country that has European culture, with its gun control and other foibles, then, they should move there and leave us here in the U.S. alone. We love our guns and our American culture that leans towards personal liberty and personal responsibility.
Having said that, though, there is an interesting thing that comes up when you start reviewing violence rates in the U.S. with other countries, starting with gun violence rates. Tom Knighton writes,
However, I want to focus on the UK’s homicide numbers versus our non-gun homicide rate.
See, this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s a look our homicide rate excluding an entire weapon type–the same type of weapon we’re told is the problem–to compare to their total homicide rate and we still have a higher rate.
Further, it would be idiotic to assume that without guns, the non-gun homicide rate would have been the exact same. At least some murderers would have used a different weapon and still been successful. That means the murder rate would have been higher than that 1.6 per 100,000 people.
And that is per capita, so you can’t claim the UK’s smaller population accounts for the difference.
The problem is that Americans, for some reason, really are just more prone toward violence. We’re more likely to kill one another than the British are.
And it’s not just the British. Our non-gun homicide rate outstrips most European nations’ total homicide rate. In fact, high-income nations have a total homicide rate of 0.8, compared to a non-gun homicide rate of twice that.
Now, those are scary numbers, aren’t they (and Knighton isn’t an advocate for gun control. Not by a long shot.).
What Knighton doesn’t mention, though, is what is really driving the violence numbers in the U.S. We’ve talked about this before here.
What’s driving rates of violence in the U.S.? The top five cities with strict gun control. Take those five cities out of the calculations, and the U.S. is just barely out of the top ten safest countries to live in out of all 196 countries in the world.
So, what do the violence statistics from other countries show us? They show us that those countries might be safer, too, if they didn’t have gun control, and that we shouldn’t have it here, anywhere, either.