As has become the norm for these debates, we have references to “gun fatalities” and “gun deaths”–but not other kinds of deaths–and we have talk about “gun suicides”–but not suicides in general. All this adds up to convey the impression that the United States is totally off the charts compared to all the other non-hellhole nations on the planet.
But if we look at human beings deliberately killing human beings in the most advanced countries on the planet–I’ll use the 34 OECD countries*–the United States doesn’t look so abnormal.
*Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
I’m taking the numbers from the United Nations and the World Health Organization. And just to be clear, the data is not great–in particular, finding data for each country from the same year is frequently impossible; instead, I’ve got a mishmash of data from 2008-2012–so there’s no point in a lot of spurious precision and multiple decimal points.
Still, it turns out that the U.S. is distinctly less violent than Mexico–well, OK, no surprise there, and that’s not really what we normally mean when we talk about comparing the U.S. to other “First World” countries–but the U.S. is also substantially less violent than South Korea, less violent than Estonia, Hungary, or Japan, and about as violent as Finland or Belgium. The United States is more violent than Australia or Canada, but it’s not a huge multiple–it’s the difference between something like 16 violent deaths per 100,000 for the U.S. versus 11 or 12 per 100,000 for Canada or Australia. We are at least twice as violent as Great Britain, and perhaps three times as violent as places like Greece or Italy.
Now you’re undoubtedly thinking that this is all crazy talk–Japan is more violent than the U.S.?!? The U.S. is only about as violent as Belgium or Finland?!? The U.S. is only a little more violent than France or Ireland?!? No fucking way, dude!
But that’s what happens when you “lump” homicide and suicide. Personally, I agree it’s kind of nuts to do that. It would be pretty whacky to decide to take your vacation in Mexico instead of South Korea, on the grounds that South Korea is more “violent” than Mexico; or to say that Japan is more “violent” than the United States. But, I keep hearing about “gun deaths” and “more Americans are now killed by guns than in car wrecks!” and so on, all of which are “lumping” homicides and suicides.
I’m not even sure why the gun-control side even does that–looking at homicide alone, the United States does in fact stand out, in a big way–OK, Mexico has us beat, and it looks like maybe Estonia edges us out. But other than that, the U.S. really does have a substantially higher homicide rate than most of its peer countries, and not just by a little bit–four times as high as Australia, and five times as high as Germany or Spain.
One thing, though–is the admittedly very high U.S. murder rate a “crisis” or an “epidemic”? The 2014 Uniform Crime Report was released just last month. Once again, the “murder rate” (technically, murder and non-negligent homicide) dropped. And that wasn’t just a blip or an abberation–the homicide rate in the United States has basically been falling for 20 years now. Not just a little fluctuation, either; the U.S. murder rate in 2014 was almost 20% lower than it was in 2004, and the rate in 2014 was less than half what it was in 1994. In fact, the U.S. murder rate in 2014 was the lowest it has been since 1957.
Will the murder rate in the U.S. continue to drop? Well, it’s difficult to say, because no one really know why it dropped in the first place. (Nor does anyone really know why murder rates spiked so much beginning in the early '60s.) Crime in general is way, way down, not just murder or even violent crime in general–there were fewer than half as many car thefts in 2014 as there were in 1995, and that’s with a population thats grown by over 56 million people (and it wasn’t because we’re now living in some Mad Max post-peak-oil sci-fi dystopia where no one steals cars because no one has cars to steal, either). Whatever we’re doing, it seems to be working–now if we could just figure out what it is that we’re doing. (It’s been seriously proposed that lead pollution–lead paint and especially leaded gasoline–were major contributors to the great late 20th century crime wave.)
Yep–that does seem to be about the size of it.
