Non-IT News Thread
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I've wondered how much culture & media plays into it as well. Something to ponder anyway.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
According to that chart on the Guardian, gun violence in the US is roughly 500% to 800% that of our counterparts in Europe. That's pretty significant. Having guns might not be the only factor, of course, as maybe their lack of drug controls makes them safer, maybe their better education makes them safer, maybe their weather makes them safer or whatever.... but the results are pretty clear that gun controls are tied to places with massively lower gun violence rates.
maybe the fact that they don't have guns in general makes them massively lower in gun violence rates - and of course that would be expected.
It's expected by most proponent of gun control but not by most arguments for having guns. The argument is normally made that having guns keeps us safe people people are afraid to use guns when everyone has guns. What you and I are saying is "obvious" a large number of Americans argue against regularly.
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Unfortunately violent crime as a category is not reported uniformly around the world. Not even close. Homicides are, as a death is pretty clearly a death, but violent crime can mean many different things and is difficult to measure.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
And frankly I'm curious to know at a per capita level the number of violent crimes committed across all weapon choices to see the differences.. and we must remove suicides and accidents from the equation.
Suicides and accidents are obviously not included in homicide numbers. That is a red herring. We are only looking at homicides in those numbers.
Now other weapons, yes, that's well worth comparing as, in theory, knife casualties could be extremely high other places.
I'm not sure that's true. I've seen several studies listing homicides and suicides were included.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Unfortunately violent crime as a category is not reported uniformly around the world. Not even close. Homicides are, as a death is pretty clearly a death, but violent crime can mean many different things and is difficult to measure.
For example child neglect is listed as a violent crime in some US stats.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm not sure that's true. I've seen several studies listing homicides and suicides were included.
You believe that the data is falsified? That's possible, but what basis do you have for not believing it? That someone produces states that include both has nothing to do with this data based purely on homicides. There is no connection between a different stat and this one
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Unfortunately violent crime as a category is not reported uniformly around the world. Not even close. Homicides are, as a death is pretty clearly a death, but violent crime can mean many different things and is difficult to measure.
For example child neglect is listed as a violent crime in some US stats.
Good example. And rape is obviously a violent crime that is common and commonly unreported.
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Here is an overall homicide crime stat that is recent and rather completely. The US does better than when we only look at guns, but the total homicide rate for the non-gun countries is still lower than the gun homicide rate alone in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
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Again, this could just mean that the US is a violent place and guns are something we have because we are violent, not violent because we have guns. Or maybe the two are totally a coincidence. But there is a strong correlation between gun control countries and total rates of homicide globally.
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What is amazing is how many places that Americans are often afraid to travel to that have homicide rates at something like 25% of America's! There are very few places that you would consider a travel destination that aren't dramatically safer than the US. A few for sure, but mostly it is quite a bit safer.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm not sure that's true. I've seen several studies listing homicides and suicides were included.
You believe that the data is falsified? That's possible, but what basis do you have for not believing it? That someone produces states that include both has nothing to do with this data based purely on homicides. There is no connection between a different stat and this one
I've seen stats pages that say Homicide by firearm*
*homicides include suicides
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@Dashrender said:
I've seen stats pages that say Homicide by firearm*
*homicides include suicides
I totally understand that some stats might include both. That doesn't suggest that this one does, though.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What is amazing is how many places that Americans are often afraid to travel to that have homicide rates at something like 25% of America's! There are very few places that you would consider a travel destination that aren't dramatically safer than the US. A few for sure, but mostly it is quite a bit safer.
So here's an important note for homicide rate - how much is gang on gang violence vs individual or gang on individual violence?
In other words, how much of that is gangs killing gangs, vs some idiot who goes on a killing spree, or a gang deciding to go on killing spree (or either with a single homicide)?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
According to The Guardian, the US is just slight more at risk of gun violence that The West Bank and Gaza. LOL. Literally war zones.
I wonder how those things are rated? We have what 100x their population? more?
It's a rate. Like a percentage. They use number per 100,000 but it doesn't matter what the rate is when you are just comparing by rate. When you talk rate, you don't care about the total size, that's the nature of rates.
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@Dashrender said:
So here's an important note for homicide rate - how much is gang on gang violence vs individual or gang on individual violence?
In other words, how much of that is gangs killing gangs, vs some idiot who goes on a killing spree, or a gang deciding to go on killing spree (or either with a single homicide)?
Not sure anyone ranks that. Not sure what we would read into any specific numbers from that either. If we could remove ALL gang members killed in some meaningful way, I'd like to see those numbers. But people killed by groups or killed by individuals I'm not sure we'd care about.
Knowing why any given person was killed would be great. But I doubt that with numbers this big you could ever collect that.
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Overall, I suspect that "idiot on a killing spree" is so small as to not show up significantly in any of the stats.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not sure anyone ranks that. Not sure what we would read into any specific numbers from that either. If we could remove ALL gang members killed in some meaningful way, I'd like to see those numbers. But people killed by groups or killed by individuals I'm not sure we'd care about.
That's the point I was trying to get at gang bangers dead vs non gang bangers.
This leads into your proposal that maybe the US is just more violent, and I'd tend to agree that our 'war on drugs' is a huge part of that. If we took the incentive for cash away from the gangs I can't imagine that the numbers wouldn't fall drastically!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Overall, I suspect that "idiot on a killing spree" is so small as to not show up significantly in any of the stats.
Of course you're probably right - but you're missing the point. The point was to compare gang related violence vs non gang related violence.
I'm guessing that Europe doesn't have the gang violence like we have here, again probably because the drug situation is different there, at least a little.
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That's definitely a realistic thing, the US simply might be a violent culture. We do many things to promote violence, guns just being one of them. We put people in jail for minor, even trivial things, we wage a war on drugs for its own sake, we encourage the creation of gangs, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing that Europe doesn't have the gang violence like we have here, again probably because the drug situation is different there, at least a little.
It has gangs and organized crime, not unlike the US. Just much less violent
