I remember reading some anecdote from an Iraqi at the peak of the war. They talked about how most of the time you're totally safe, but every once in a while a bomb will go off and a bunch of people will die.
There's a spectrum of danger that a lot of us have had the privilege to not experience. I could imagine getting mugged in some places in Europe, but not really imagine dying in the "mugging gone wrong => someone is dead" scenario you hear about in the US.
And of course the idea that I might get killed in a traffic stop is something I have the privilege to not experience.
The majority of the US has a murder rate comparable to Canada. The US has particularly extremely tilted murder rates based on location. Relatively small areas with hyper murder rates very substantially skew the numbers. A couple dozen neighborhoods in Chicago for example combine to account for about 2% of all murders in the US (with murder rates 50 to 100 times the national average).
A minimum of 95% of the US population live in areas with murder rates comparable to Canada (around 1.5 to 2 per 100,000 depending on the year). More than 200 million Americans live in areas with murder rates under 2. That's not impressive compared to the nicest parts of Europe, but it is very impressive compared to Latin America and Europe's largest country, Russia.
> but it is very impressive compared to Latin America and Europe's largest country, Russia.
"Better than Russia!" isn't much to brag about when it comes to social niceties. Given that the US starts out at half Russia's homicide rate even before you filter out anything, it seems like you're intentionally selecting a very bad comparator to make it look good.
And given that 17 of the top 20 homicide-rate countries are in Latin America, that's an even worse comparator. Indeed, the top 4 countries that are around double #5 and below, they're all in Latin America. You couldn't ask for a worse comparator - being better than the most extreme outliers isn't "very impressive" in the slightest.
Likewise, if you're pulling the trick of "oh, don't include the bits where the crime really happens", you need to do the same to the other countries you're comparing against. They have crime centers as well, and it's not an apples-to-apples comparison if you don't treat them similarly.
what's the murder rate measured on? Chicago is already almost 1% of the population, so I don't see how the murder rate per capita is 50 or 100 times the national average.
Also "200 million Americans don't even live in areas with bad stats" is another way of saying "100 million Americans live in areas with high murder rates"... seems like a larger issue than you're implying
right, I get that. But is it like.. 10% of Chicago? 1%?
If it's 20% of Chicago but has 50-100x the national per capita average, that's pretty crazy. If it's one house where everyone in the house was murdered (1 murder per capita!), well it's not really representative of much.
There's a spectrum of danger that a lot of us have had the privilege to not experience. I could imagine getting mugged in some places in Europe, but not really imagine dying in the "mugging gone wrong => someone is dead" scenario you hear about in the US.
And of course the idea that I might get killed in a traffic stop is something I have the privilege to not experience.