Axver said:
I know it's Wikipedia, but this page seems satisfactorily referenced and makes for interesting reading. Especially note the map, which is the number of murders per 100,000 people. It is worth noting that the US is doing worse than the entire West, and it is also interesting to see which third world countries are doing better - though, of course, some of those countries may be doing better simply due to a lack of reporting of murders rather than actually having a lower murder rate.
I see a lot of people pinning the blame for the US's comparatively alarmingly high murder rate on societal conditions in inner city ghettos. While this may be the case, it begs the question: why is this a much worse problem in the US than elsewhere? Every large city has its poor and impoverished areas with high crime rates, but they don't distort the overall statistics in other countries as severely as they do in the US. Why?
Also, does anyone have a breakdown of the US murder rates to substantiate this? When impoverished inner city regions are excluded from the equation, how does the US compare? Is this high rate just an inner city problem or are other areas being overlooked?
You'd probably need someone with a solid background in US criminology to answer the last question--I can't think of any relevant database that would allow you to break down the data in precisely that way without a lot of agonizingly slow piecemeal work. I'm inclined to *guess* that gang-/drug-related violence
is crucial to explaining the murder rate in "impoverished inner city regions"--the high concentration of guns that tends to go along with gang activity obviously also factors in (close to 100% of gang-related murders involve guns; for most other motives, it's about 60-75%), but unfortunately, gun control laws alone wouldn't do much to change that. Urban gang violence is also a serious issue in several Latin American countries (though I take it you don't consider those part of "the West") so the US is not wholly alone in that problem. But I really couldn't tell you to what extent precisely the murder rate in urban ghettos impacts our rate overall, only that they tend to be centers of gang activity. *I think* something like 1 in every 18 murders in the US are thought to be gang-related, but I can't find a source right now to verify that--I'm sure it's buried in the byzantine US Bureau of Justice Stats site someplace. That's not really all that high a proportion in the big picture, but I'm sure if you live in a gang-afflicted area it feels like it is.
As far as other regions go, I do think stricter gun control laws would help. To back up for a second to what I said earlier about the murder rate where I grew up in MS, while it was certainly low by overall US standards, I doubt very much that it would've been low by
your country's standards. (And I apologize for not being able to provide hard data here, I did look around a bit, but I just can't find online info for the region I lived in going back that far.) I do remember for sure that most murders involved guns. While I don't doubt that *some* of them would certainly have occurred whether guns were around or not, I don't buy that *most* of them would have. There
is such a thing as responsible gun ownership and certainly most gun owners I knew practiced it, but on the other hand, enforcement was pretty loose and there's no two ways about the fact that having a gun just makes it so much easier to turn a moment of rage into murder. You don't have that window of 90 seconds or so of sustained assault while your victim screams, bleeds, writhes and tries to get away, in order to come to your senses and rethink what you're doing, that you would have if you were doing the job with a knife or a fist. Now as to whether the problem there was more the sheer prevalence of guns or the failure of too many to follow the laws concerning storage, handling, when you could carry them around loaded and not and so forth, that I couldn't really tell you.
It may very well be the case that even if we could eliminate gang activity, sharply scale back gun availability and more strictly enforce gun handling laws, we would still have a much higher murder rate. But I can't think of any other "remedies" whose underlying diagnosis really convinces me. The economic inequality issue is always one that comes up but it's so hard to build a consistent case for that from the data, especially if you're talking international comparisons. It's a somewhat stronger case though if you limit your data to major metropolitan areas within the same country.