utbagpiper
Banned
This article is now 9 months old, but a quick search didn't turn it up here. It was recently posted on UCCdC and I thought it worth passing along.
"The Mistake of Only Comparing Murder Rates to "Developed" Countries", by Ryan McMaken, posted 10/12/15 to the Mises Institute Website.
A couple of fair use excerpts to whet your appetite. The article includes several very enlightening graphs. An easy and interesting 10 minute read.
Charles
"The Mistake of Only Comparing Murder Rates to "Developed" Countries", by Ryan McMaken, posted 10/12/15 to the Mises Institute Website.
A couple of fair use excerpts to whet your appetite. The article includes several very enlightening graphs. An easy and interesting 10 minute read.
Charles
Mises Article said: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. ...
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.
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Once we understand these facts, and do not cling to bizarre xenophobic views about how everyone outside the "developed" world is too dysfunctional and/or subhuman (although few gun control advocates would ever admit to the thought) to bear comparison to the US, we immediately see that the mantra "worst in the developed world" offers an immensely skewed, unrealistic, and even bigoted view of the world and how countries compare to each other.
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And why not include data from individual states? It has always been extremely imprecise and lazy to talk about the “US murder rate” The US is an immense country with a lot of variety in laws and demographics. (Mexico deserves the same analysis, by the way.) Many states have murder rates that place them on the short list of low-crime places in the world. Why do we conveniently ignore them? The US murder rate is being driven up by a few high-murder states such as Maryland, Louisiana, South Carolina, Delaware, and Tennessee. In the spirit of selective use of data, let's just leave those states out of it, and look at some of the low-crime ones:
We see that OECD members Chile and Turkey have murder rates higher than Colorado. Perhaps they should try adopting Colorado’s laws and allow sale of handguns and semi-automatic rifles to all non-felon adults. That might help them bring their murder rates down a little.
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