I winced when you started the comparison with Brazil and Mexico. Those countries may be New World, but anybody who's visited Mexico knows not to go random places alone.
In other words, if Brazil and Mexico are our points of comparison, we're... not in a situation I'd want to be in, to put it diplomatically. Reddit's running joke is that every gunfight happened in Brazil. In fact, I often wonder if most of the gunfight videos actually do come from Brazil.
It's doubly ironic because of course a large swath of the guns in what is bordering on civil war in Mexico are supplied by the US, made possible through the (lack of) gun ownership regulation.
> It's doubly ironic because of course a large swath of the guns in what is bordering on civil war in Mexico are supplied by the US, made possible through the (lack of) gun ownership regulation.
If the cartels can ship large amounts of highly illegal cargo transnationally and setup infrastructure like their own private cellular networks, I think they'd be able to acquire all the guns they need even if the US had strict gun control. It's not like they're that hard to make, especially if you're not above kidnapping some machinists.
"The cartels" is not a single organisation. Yes the largest best-organised gangs could build firearms factories - or more realistically just bribe some soldiers or cops to "lose" a few truckloads of weapons, just like they do with automatic weapons right now.
But there is a huge difference in a weapon being available by the dozens to the highest tier of the top 2-3 cartels (like machine guns or rocket launchers or IFVs are right now), and a weapon being available by the hundred thousands for anyone with a few dollars to their name!
I meant more than just criminal prosecution. For example, federal gun control checks are prohibited from being automated and there’s a fixed time limit the FBI needs to respond within or the gun can be sold. Effectively this neuters federal background checks. Similarly, there’s ways of skirting even that trivial thing through private sale and firearm shows.
The entire system is a farce and I’m surprised there’s anyone who thinks it’s not. I would have though pro gun advocates would at least know enough to acknowledge the Swiss cheese nature of the systems in place around gun ownership in America.
As the article mentions, there are people that slip through the cracks, but the foremost problem around keeping weapons out of the wrong hands has little to do with the FBI.
For example, there are a large number of guns owned by people of color who didn’t buy them legally, not because they couldn’t, but because they either didn’t know they needed to, or they didn’t trust the legal route.
That’s the kind of thing your 3% number applies to. The only way to ‘prosecute’ those offenses would be to lock up a lot of otherwise law abiding black men who are only criminals on paper because of racist gun control laws.
It’s important to understand this context before using words like ‘lackadaisical’.
If you mean things like actual violence or conspiracies to traffic firearms, these are prosecuted vigorously and the 3% figure is bullshit in that context.
I’m guessing you weren’t aware of the detail behind this figure.
"If you mean things like actual violence or conspiracies to traffic firearms, these are prosecuted vigorously and the 3% figure is bullshit in that context."
I'd love to see your data then. My data shows a different picture.
The majority of prosecutions within that 3% are possession by a felon. The next most common are ones involving a violent crime or drug offense, and possession by a person in the United states illegally. The reason prosecution is so low and doesn't include more violent offenders is because the federal government is lackadaisical and decides not to prosecute them. They instead allow the states to prosecute under state law. Even if the states prosecute under their own laws, the feds still can prosecute under the federal law if they wanted to.
Around 10k federal prosecution out of over 400k occurrence of violent crime involving a firearm. That's a terrible percentage in my mind. Links at bottom
"there are a large number of guns owned by people of color who didn’t buy them legally, not because they couldn’t, but because they either didn’t know they needed to, or they didn’t trust the legal route."
You seem to imply that they are not prohibited since they could buy them "legally". What exactly do you mean by buying them "illegally"? Do you have any data on this "large number" of minorities that bought guns illegally and how that compares to other groups?
I'd also like to hear how you believe the federal laws are racist and which ones in particular. I know there are some state laws that have racist roots. I can even agree that the structure around loss of rights should be reexamined, but isnt wholly racist (non-violent felonies should be excluded, and some recent case law is starting to move this).
> The reason prosecution is so low and doesn't include more violent offenders is because the federal government is lackadaisical and decides not to prosecute them. They instead allow the states to prosecute under state law.
Wait, so the 3% number is a lie? It’s not the percentage prosecuted. It’s the percentage prosecuted by the federal government rather than the states?
You said: “Only 3% of federal firearm offenses are prosecuted.”
Which turns out to be false. The offenses are prosecuted, just not by the federal government. You say that is ‘lackadaisical’ as if you have some justification for that, but deferring to states is a common practice in the US and indicates no such thing.
It sure looks like you are intentionally trying to mislead people, otherwise you’d probably have mentioned this up front.
As far as racism goes, it’s pretty easy to understand if you apply Ibram Kendi’s definition - if it disproportionately affects black communities, it is a racist policy.
"Which turns out to be false. The offenses are prosecuted, just not by the federal government."
You don't seem to understand how the law works. The Federal offenses are not prosecuted. The State offenses are. My statement is true.
"but deferring to states is a common practice in the US and indicates no such thing."
Lack of interest in pursuing the law would fit with the definition of lackadaisical. I've given you the stats that show they are not interested in pursuing the federal crimes.
This isn't really deferring to the states. If one is not guilty under state law, the feds may subsequently prosecute under the federal law. Even if you're found guilty at the state level, they might prosecute you just to make an example of you (Chauvin, recently). It's a sloppy way for the people in power to ignore equal application of the law by picking and choosing who deserves it, which to me undermines the very principle of rule of law.
"It sure looks like you are intentionally trying to mislead people, otherwise you’d probably have mentioned this up front."
I have not tried to mislead anyone. Perhaps you were projecting your own ideas on it based on your lack of willingness to engage in a meaningful debate. After all, you're the one calling my statements total BS, yet not providing any responses to the questions posed around sources or data to support your position or refute the data I have provided.
"As far as racism goes, it’s pretty easy to understand if you apply Ibram Kendi’s definition - if it disproportionately affects black communities, it is a racist policy."
If that's the case, everything is racist and the very definition provided is racist since it only deals with "black communities" and not others. Perhaps we can use a widely accepted definition, like from a dictionary. Then you can also explain what is being disproportionately affected along with the why and how.
So, where is your response to the requests around definitions and data for "illegally" purchased guns and their impact? Conveniently ignoring this too? I'm starting to think you are a troll.
> You don't seem to understand how the law works. The Federal offenses are not prosecuted. The State offenses are. My statement is true.
It’s only true in a narrow technical sense. You were clearly trying to give the impression that people were simply getting away with these offenses, when what is actually happening is that the federal government doesn’t see the need to prosecute people who are already being prosecuted by the states.
> It's a sloppy way for the people in power to ignore equal application of the law by picking and choosing who deserves it, which to me undermines the very principle of rule of law.
Prosecutorial discretion definitely undermines the rule of law, and is a well known people, but it’s everywhere in every justice system and has nothing to do with the government’s approach to guns.
As for the Kendi definition, I was using black in this example because most gun control laws disproportionately affect black people. Substitute other races if you like.
I don’t need to refute your position with data - that’s not what’s wrong with it.
We’ve shown that your 3% claim was misleading as presented.
> Prosecutorial discretion definitely undermines the rule of law, and is a well known people, but it’s everywhere in every justice system and has nothing to do with the government’s approach to guns.
Prosecutorial discretion is an incredibly great thing, and is another element of the legacy bequeathed to us from the Romans by way of the English, through English Common Law.
The old statement de minimis non curat lex (the law does not concern itself with trifles), alternatively, de minimis non curat praetor (the praetor does not concern himself with trifles) illustrates why justice must be tempered with wisdom, although not exactly the same thing as prosecutorial discretion.
The government does not have unlimited resources with which to pursue cases. When it does wield the terrible power of the justice system against a suspect, it should be in the right instances, and for the right reasons, for an example.
A good example of prosecutorial discretion is around a case where a father finds his daughter or son, actively being raped/molested. In some cases, it may go to grand jury if there is a death [1]. However, in other examples [2], a prosecutor declines to prosecute given all of the circumstances, and weighing what happened.
While there is such as thing as selective enforcement, where bias has entered the mind of some element of law enforcement and enables some to be pursued, or others not to be for some bogus reason, that is not what we are talking about here.
"We’ve shown that your 3% claim was misleading as presented."
Lol where did you show that? The 3% claim is only misleading because you are applying a context to it that it was not intended for. The point is that additional federal gun laws will not be enforced because the government does not enforce the current ones, and doesn't even have the resources to do so. If anything, you have been the misleading one by presenting false information and failing to back up your (trolling) claims. You can go back to the root comment to see that they are approaching this from a light that additional federal gun laws would not be effective since the current ones are not being enforced.
"I don’t need to refute your position with data - that’s not what’s wrong with it."
Then, please, get to the point and tell me what is wrong with it. Stop draffing this out with unsubstantiated claims, twisting words, and flat out lies. Not all my questions were data related, but also conceptual - yet you ignore those as well (for example, you still haven't defined the 'illegal' gun purchases).
Whoa, whoa. I'm not a mod, but I don't want you to get in trouble -- a friendly note to remember that this debate really isn't worth it, and calling people names isn't going to do anything positive for you or the site.
Not my place, but unfortunately there's no contact info in your profile, so I can't email you. I'd rather risk saying it here than watch you kick a hornet's nest. Being rate limited is no fun, but it's the inevitable consequence of such behavior; penalties only increase from there.
It's easy to get heated, so a quick edit + heading outside is often the cure, for me at least.
Are you talking to me or the person calling me a liar? Trolling is not allowed, and a preponderence of the evidence shows the other person to be trolling (using false statements and not correcting them, calling others a liar, not engaging in meaningful debate, avoiding legitimate questions while continuing to attack, etc). I have full confidence in the mods here.
The venom with which you've imbued your comment is toxic to the culture of the site. One of the most important ideas is the principle of charity, which means you must interpret each argument as if they're not trolling. Flat out calling someone a troll and a liar is a personal attack, and if you keep doing it I have no doubt the mods will be along to defend the site – which is their duty. Hence, kicking the hornet's nest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365 is a surprisingly good primer for this, if you'd like to understand where they're coming from. Notice that "name-calling" is explicitly called out.
Having full confidence in the mods is actually a dangerous thing. I too had full confidence in the mods at one point. And, like you, I wasn't aware that I was using HN in a way that HN isn't designed for. This is a friendly reminder that you may get lucky and escape notice (HN is quite big now), but it's a matter of time before you'll get a stern talking to; the penalties only increase from there.
Don't take it personally, if it happens. It's not. And if I'm mistaken about any of this, I will happily eat crow and apologize, along with hanging up my hat of "issuing friendly warnings" in general. You could email them and ask, but the inevitable outcome is a "yes, calling people trolls and liars is off topic here; HN is for intellectual curiosity, which is a delicate thing," along with attracting attention to yourself.
In other words, don't let other people get to you. It's not worth it. Even if they are lying or trolls, you can simply say "That's not true because X" and leave it at that.
The USA also has plenty of gun production capacity. Unless you really believe 25% of Americans own 20 guns each, there is a lot of winking and nudging that guns are going south for drugs coming north.
Generally if you're going to own guns you're going to own several, just like you likely own more than one screwdriver. Small gauge shotguns for small birds, larger for larger birds, smooth bore for deer depending on state. Rifles there will be several, same for pistols. With rifles and pistols you generally practice with small caliber rounds like 22 as it's much much cheaper ($.02 / rnd vs $2), and really more pleasant (quiet, doesn't kick) than hunting rounds.
Everyone I know who has a gun has at least 4.
My friend's grandfather owns 73. In many areas that's an unremarkable number, especially for older shotguns where you didn't have interchangeable chokes.
> Rifles there will be several, same for pistols. With rifles and pistols you generally practice with small caliber rounds like 22 as it's much much cheaper ($.02 / rnd vs $2), and really more pleasant (quiet, doesn't kick) than hunting rounds.
Most of my experience, thanks to the US taxpayer to whom I am permanently indebted, is with an M60, an M240, and an M249.
I would like my wife, and my daughters to have skill with weapons too, so I was thinking about an HK417 for myself, and then getting an HK416 clone chambered in .22LR for practice.
It takes a healthy respect, and practiced expertise in weapons to build competency, and I think that relates to a number of rounds fired. Hopefully, small caliber for cost savings!
I got a 22lr slide for a 40sw sig for $300 and paid for it in about 3 trips to the range and a few thousand rounds. Benefit, it stovepipes all the time so it lets you practice failure modes all the time. Very worth it. I swap between it and real rounds to keep myself from getting recoil-shy.
I'd also recommend something like a mantis-x which lets you practice smooth trigger pulls while dry firing. It's actually a pretty smart bit of tech, it's all based on the one of the solid state accelerometers like you have in your phone.
I was thinking this would be something similar to the trigger squeeze and breathing monitors I used with weapons training VR, but this actually looks like it would be really useful, and very data driven. Appreciate the info!
> Unless you really believe 25% of Americans own 20 guns each
On average, that's entirely believable.
I think the vast majority of those people own 4-10 guns, but there are enough people who own hundreds of guns to make the mean a lot higher. In fact this is a classic example of a situation where mean can be significantly higher than median.
Brazilian gunfights between criminals and off-duty cops are a pretty big trope when it comes to videos of self-defense incidents. Of course, off-duty cops are basically the only Brazilians allowed to conceal carry.
Numbers wise, we are doing much better than Mexico and Brazil, by about the same factor that France is doing better than we are and Japan is doing better than France. US homicide rates are a lot closer to Greenland or Argentina, and significantly less than a lot of nice LatAm countries that are popular with Western expats such as Costa Rica or Panama or Uruguay. The legality and availability of firearms cannot fully explain these differences, and it’s incomplete to simply compare the US to the EU.
> I winced when you started the comparison with Brazil and Mexico.
What about Greenland?
> ...anybody who's visited Mexico knows not to go random places alone.
It's the same in the US, and basically every country in the world. Some places are dangerous, others aren't.
> ...if Brazil and Mexico are our points of comparison, we're... not in a situation I'd want to be in, to put it diplomatically.
Put it undiplomatically. What exactly do you mean by that? Draw me a picture with crayons, I want to understand clearly what this means.
An important point in the comment you replied to was that maybe demand for firearms is the result of the crime rate and not the cause. Care to address that?
> It's the same in the US, and basically every country in the world. Some places are dangerous, others aren't.
No, it's really not. I spent a number of years living in Seoul, and you can have a 25 million people metro area with virtually no areas you wouldn't go to alone at night. They may exist, somewhere, but you really have to struggle to find them. That plus no loud and aggressive people on the streets, basically never having to feel guarded or adjusting your walking path to avoid that one sketchy person.
US cities can be such stressful, on-guard, subtly "stand your ground"/"toughen up" experiences in comparison sometimes. It's draining, really just wasted energy, and as a man, makes me behave in wasy I don't actually want to.
Culture really matters. Weapon laws really matter. And national pride in places and spaces that just simply don't shape up well is something to resist.
I have a feeling that the entire "arm the populace" mindset and everything that goes along with it (the lack of interest in consensus-building displayed by wanting to maintain an exit from it, etc.) is much more likely to generate the sort of politics and politicians that would ever require civilian I arms use.
States can certainly go bad in many ways. South Korea managed to impeach its most recent bad President through peaceful protest alone (search "Park Geun-Hye protests") with basically not even a punch thrown, however.
Idk why the downvotes for orangepurple, that is basically correct. Heterogeneous societies are much harder to govern. Different kinds of people living side-by-side fight. The calmest, most in-control societies around the world are homogeneous. SK, NK, and Japan are the most ethnically homogeneous countries on earth.
Oh, and SK is an oligarchy. Essentially everything is run by a handful of families (those who run the chaebol), everybody knows about it, and it's been the status quo for years. Not that that's necessarily bad, though it isn't ideal. SK has risen from destruction to dictatorship to mostly-rich-and-democratic.
I disagree that weapon laws really matter, they matter maybe a little. Most of the variance in murder rates is more productively explained by things like homogeneity, rich-poor divide, cultures of violence, etc.
> Different kinds of people living side-by-side fight. The calmest, most in-control societies around the world are homogeneous.
Switzerland. 3-4 ethnic groups with entirely different languages as well as quite different wealth levels, managing to go without massacres and civil wars for hundreds of years. (So that their different wealth levels now look like the difference between "well-off" and "filthy rich" to their neighbours...)
Good comment. They're all white europeans and they're physically separated from each other by geography, which makes this importantly not like the U.S. for example. We can see small examples of this in cities that have longstanding (hundreds of years +) minority populations. It's not like they're mixed together, what always happens is there is a "Jewish Quarter", "Chinatown", etc. More like micro-states within a state.
edit: Maybe people thing "Good comment" was sarcastic? I genuinely meant it was a productive addition to the discussion :-)
Also, I'm not just making this up. There's significant scholarship on the question.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The cultures of SK and the US are very, very different. Particularly, south Koreans are all united by being under the constant threat of devastating war as long as almost any of them have been alive.
Which is also something that you rarely feel in daily life, although it does certainly have impact on society (mainly in terms of a period of mandatory army service for young men, similar to many European countries). I'd say the War on Terror or the Cold War had a lot more presence in the US.
IDK, there are scares every so often in SK. I remember being told to carry my passport and a couple thousand dollars in cash + memorize your color-coded evac route by the Embassy during one such crisis.
Because I can't help but get the sense that using those countries, culturally very distinct from the US, is cherry picking st best. If the "legal firearms lead to more violence and crime, and if we restrict comparison to new world highly developed countries this still holds" argument is to stand, then the comparison has to apply to every country with firearm restrictions, not just a couple. If it doesn't apply across the board then that is an indicator that culture plays an outsized role and legal status of firearms does not.
So I answered your question, now your turn, what about Argentina?
Because Canada is the closest country on earth to the US culturally and Australia and New Zealand are not far behind. Also, poverty tends to increase crime and CA/AU/NZ are closer to US economically as well, while Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa are far behind. If you want to pick one country to compare it to the US, it only makes sense to pick Canada. Argentina is very far down the list.
The main difference between Canada and US (and to a great extent Australia and New Zealand) are not cultural or economical. The main differences are in access to firearms. I fully expect Canada's murder rate to rise to US levels if US gun laws were adopted here.
There are a few very significant cultural/economic differences between the USA and Canada/Austrial/NZ.
The biggest one is that only the USA has a legacy of slavery. The USA has much higher population density as well. The USA is also somewhat more economically unequal than the other 3. The USA is more diverse than any of the other 3, especially Canada and Australia.
The US is the least diverse of those countries. Australia has 30%(2019) of foreign born resident's to NZ's 27.4%(2018),Canada's 20%(2016) and the US's 13.7%(2018)
"Foreign born" is really not the best judge of diversity in this context imo. I would instead look at the fraction of population that has European ancestry.
I have not seen many statistics linking foreign-born residents to higher crime, but locally-born oppressed minority populations (e.g. Black, Aboriginal, Native, Maori) are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system due to ongoing legacies of systemic violence.
I thought the whole point of the ongoing systemic racism debates in the US was that even after correcting for poverty, African Americans still had worse outcomes on essentially every metric from college graduation to murder rate?
While there are almost certainly small variations, the high order bit is economics. By a wide margin.
This is almost invariably left out of the equation when these things are reported.
Just like the so-called "gender wage gap", which is at best a "gender earnings gap", because pay is equivalent, dissipates almost entirely when you account for things like occupation and hours worked.
Even if you accept that differences are solely economic (this a very tough sell for raical inequality imo, it's far from fully explained by economics), that leaves you with the question of why are black people disproportionately impoverished. This is a tougher question than why women tend to work fewer hours.
And I am fully aware that these facts are a "tough sell" these days, because they don't fit the prevailing narrative.
Another one: yes, the criminal justice system is biased against blacks. However, it is vastly more biased against males. By a 6:1 margin.
And yes, I agree that the question why black people who are not recent immigrants are disproportionately impoverished is important to answer. It is important to ask the right questions if you want to get a usable answer. And I doubt there is a unifactorial answer.
Why the "who are not recent immigrants"? Black people who are recent immigrants from Africa actually do better economically than whites.
"Solely" is a thought experiment, just to highlight the importance of that question.
It's a tough sell because statistics don't back it up; there are other significant factors at play.
There are certainly some biases against men but i think you are overestimating this one. Are you accounting for the differences between men and women?
The success of African immigrants suggests that the effect really has nothing to do with skin color, but other societal and cultural factors. Luckily society and culture are both mutable.
A young black man in the 2nd perctile of income has the same chance of being incarcerated as a young white man in the 65th. The difference between the 1st percentile and 99th percentile young white men is smaller than between 80th percentile black men and white men. [1] I'm not sure which stats you are looking at, but the ones I see suggest that economics are not the biggest factor.
The gender disparity is interesting and I wasn't aware of it's severity. Thanks.
So your blog post is contradicted by the research I cited.
How to explain the difference? Well, the blog post doesn't control for other variables. Such as, crucially, how much crime do people commit and how severe are those crimes?
The UofM study did control for such factors.
And yeah, how much crime people commit varies and, yeah, has a pretty severe impact on how much incarceration happens. If you didn't control for these variables, the male/female disparity would be incredibly more severe, as the vast majority of inmates are male.
And if you look, you will see that the research the blog post references comes from an advocacy group.
Access to guns is the main source of gun crime. 'Oppressed local minority populations' or non-european diversity or whatever other racial euphemism you wish to use has nothing to do with it.
So 13% native black population, a higher percentage native born Hispanic population, multiple generations of multiple different Asian cultures, these dont count? Why?
All your metric does is demonstrate who began allowing immigration first.
US is 76.3% white compared to Canada's 77.7% white. Still pretty similar. Actually, US's numbers are from 2019 but Canada's are from 2016. Canada's percentage should be lower than US's now, given the difference in their annual immigration numbers.
I think 76.3% white is misleading because, while the U.S. Census Bureau counts hispanic people as "white", basically no North American's intuitive model of race or ethnicity would count hispanics as white. Which is why the Census is always careful to break out non-Hispanic white.
The real comparison is non-Hispanic white to non-Hispanic white, where it becomes ~55% to ~75% or so. Hispanic people in the U.S. are easily visually differentiable, most often have one or more languages aside from, or instead of, English and come from cultures that are markedly different than mainstream U.S. culture.
It's getting into the weeds a little, but there are also likely differences between local vanquished populations, immigrants and their descendants who arrive voluntarily by air/sea, those who arrive voluntarily by land and those who arrive involuntarily.
Canada and the USA are close overall, but Canada's immigrants are much more likely to be educated professionals than those coming to the USA. And since Canada never implemented widespread slavery, there really isn't an analog to the experience of black Americans. I think that is a very big factor.
That's true for every sufficiently-large section of the world. But different places have different statistical properties.
Look, my grandpa took me shooting when I was young. I remember doing target practice under a bridge when I was like 7, using a freakin' magnum revolver of all things. It was next to a very small river, and someone further downstream was trying to fish. I asked gramps "Do you think he heard us?" and he laughed "I don't think anybody didn't hear us."
That's the kind of culture I come from. I suspect in this thread there are at least three factions: the pro-guns, the anti-guns, and the undecideds.
As someone who was raised from an early age to be pro-gun, I do see the merits. But it's important that we acknowledge the downsides. If, statistically, America is so screwed up that you need to compare to Brazil and Mexico before the numbers start looking sort of reasonable, there may be a correlation with gun ownership the way that smoking may be correlated with cancer.
> If, statistically, America is so screwed up that you need to compare to Brazil and Mexico before the numbers start looking sort of reasonable, there may be a correlation with gun ownership the way that smoking may be correlated with cancer.
Compared to Mexico and Brazil, the US numbers look fucking awesome.
Compared to Greenland and Argentina, the US numbers look perfectly reasonable.
Compared to France, maybe we look bad. But compared to Japan, even France looks bad.
If I was trying to convince the French to reinstate the death penalty by pointing out that their homicide rate was 4-6 times as bad as Japan, and the French said “yeah but our homicide rate is 1/4 that of the US”, they would have a point. Single factors that map onto popular political controversies aren’t as big a factor as broader social and cultural factors. If you look at those factors, Japan is not a comparable country to France and France is not a comparable country to the United States.
Basically your argument boils down to: The USA is substantially an undeveloped shithole full of corrupt/ineffectual law enforcement, barely functional or legitimate government, broke unemployed people incapable of solving problems peacefully with nothing to lose, and powerful thugs beyond the reach of the law, so we should feel great pride that we aren’t quite as violent and dangerous as places where the gangsters are the primary source of local force and the law enforcement / military are essentially gangsters themselves.
I guess....
But on the flip side, the USA is almost incomparably richer than those countries (in natural resources, infrastructure, human capital, ...), has a much better developed and more legitimate set of public institutions, has a tradition of settling disputes via political/legal processes instead of gang warfare, and in most ways looks much more like wealthy industrialized countries than new developing-country slums.
So, instead of giving up and patting ourselves on the back because it could always be worse, as an alternative we could, y'know, try to get the most desperate people access to basic essentials required for human flourishing, and aim to reduce the levels of violence and corruption over time, the way people have successfully done in many other countries around the world.
> Basically your argument boils down to: The USA is substantially an undeveloped shithole full of corrupt/ineffectual law enforcement, barely functional or legitimate government, broke unemployed people incapable of solving problems peacefully with nothing to lose, and powerful thugs beyond the reach of the law, so we should feel great pride that we aren’t quite as violent and dangerous as places where the gangsters are the primary source of local force and the law enforcement / military are essentially gangsters themselves.
>> That's true for every sufficiently-large section of the world
Well I think Mexico is a sufficiently-large section of the world that statements like "anybody who's visited Mexico knows not to go random places alone" should be called out, don't you agree?
I would say poverty has more to do with the murder rate than anything else.
If you want to go and rob houses or join a gang, you'll get a gun, legally or illegally. This happens everywhere, not only where guns are legal.
If you can't get a gun, you'll get a big knife or a baseball bat.
The USA is rich in GDP per capita but has patches with poor people with little to lose.
In many EU countries there is far less people with little to lose, even among the poor ones.
Crime in EU is, similarly, disproportionally caused by those who have little to lose, eg. illegal immigrants.
Murder clearance rate by police has more to do with murder rate.
You are much more likely to get away with murder in the US (where clearance rates are 60% at best) than you are in Japan or the UK (where clearance rates are above 90%).
> but anybody who's visited Mexico knows not to go random places alone
Canadian here... isn't that true in most of the highly-populated areas in the US as well? And, to be honest, some parts of Canada as well; I definitely know a neighbourhood not to far from where I live where I'm highly unlikely to walk in the dark.
It's going to be true almost everywhere (not Japan? Switzerland?)
The real question is to what extent is it true? I think stumbling into such a place at night in the U.S. would be quite hard, Canada even harder. In Mexico, my feeling is you really ought to plan. You can't just drive from Point A to Point B across the country at night, whereas in the rest of North America you sure can.
" if Brazil and Mexico are our points of comparison"
Almost half of all US homicides are drug/gang related, so obviously there will be links to south american countries where these enterprises also operate.
If you want to avoid high crime, move north. Northern states have a homicide rate roughly half the national average.
You ever heard of Chicago? Up to the minute crime statistics in this northern state city with some of the most restrictive gun control can easily be found. [1.]
In other words, if Brazil and Mexico are our points of comparison, we're... not in a situation I'd want to be in, to put it diplomatically. Reddit's running joke is that every gunfight happened in Brazil. In fact, I often wonder if most of the gunfight videos actually do come from Brazil.