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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (107869)	4/5/2005 12:05:04 PM
From: JDN	Respond to of 793915

So Mary, what are the statistics on murders committed with a knife? Chose your weapon. jdn

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (107869)	4/5/2005 12:14:03 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793915

You need to look a little deeper, Mary. American vs. European Crime Rates tinyvital.com A German lawyer, in response to another blog entry (German Justice: 2 Days Per Murder), repeated the common European belief that the United States has a much higher crime rate than major European countries. The facts are quite different... [UPDATE 8/15/2003 - For sources, see end of article] [Warning: this article is politically incorrect. If you are likely to be offended by this, you need to read it!] Here are Interpol 2001 crime statistics (rate per 100,000): * 4161 - US * 7736 - Germany * 6941 - France * 9927 - England and Wales Thus the US has a substantially lower crime rate than the major European countries! Here are the Interpol 1995 crime statistics (rate per 100,000): * 5278 - US * 8179 - Germany * 6316 - France * 7206 - England & Wales Hence the trend in the US is towards a lower crime rate, while the trend in Europe (except Germany) is towards an increasing crime rate. It is true that we (USA) have a high murder rate, mostly of criminals killing criminals, but a distressingly large number of people killing their spouses in anger, and the rate of "stranger killings" is rising. However, the homicide rates have been dropping dramatically as we have been increasing penalties: Homicide Rate/100,000 by Date in US: * 1980 - 10.2 * 2000 - 5.5 Also, our murder rate is high largely due to the multicultural nature of our society. Inner city blacks, members of a distinct subculture, have a vastly higher criminal and victim homicide rate than our society as an average: Homicide Offender Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000): * 3.4 - White * 25.8 - Black * 3.2 - Other It is often hypothesized that blacks are overrepresented in murder statistics due to racism on the part of police and the justice system. If this were true, one would expect that the race of victims would have significantly different distribution than the race of the perpetrators, but this is not the case: Homicide Victim Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000): * 3.3 - White * 20.5 - Black * 2.7 - Other Thus if you remove homicides committed by blacks (total: 21862, Blacks:9316), and assume a proportionality between number of offenders and number of offenses, you can extrapolate US homicide offender rate of only 2.6/100,000, lower than Germany (3.27) and France (3.91). One might ask why blacks are singled out. The reason is that inner city blacks are not representative of our culture. The black population is only about 13% of the total, and many blacks do not live in the inner city welfare cultures. Also, dividing the raw numbers into "white", "black" and "other," as was done by the Justice Department, shows that there are more black murderers (9316) than there are white and "other" combined (8346). I do not have statistics breaking out homicide by race AND location, but since most homicides committed by blacks are done in the inner city, the overall black statistic should be a good proxy. Many, including myself, blame the high inner city crime rate on several factors: * Misguided welfare policies, which have helped to create a culture of irresponsibility. * The ideology of racial separatism (black power, etc.) and its relative, multiculturalism and the cult of victimology. * Centuries of slavery and oppression, which really only came to an end in the 1960-current time period. That the dramatic increase in the black crime rate came after the rise of the welfare state and the creation of black racial separatism and victimology suggests the causative nature of those factors. NOTE: Statistics used here are not "cooked" in the sense of using the years that best support my argument. They are simply the oldest and newest years available from the sources, with the exception of the US homicide rate in 1980, which was a maximum over a long time, but not atypical of the period. NOTE: I found one relatively obvious error in the data above, and have replaced that with accurate data. Also I have slightly changed the wording to better reflect the methods of calculation, and adjusted the non-black rate slightly with the new data. 7/31/2002. NOTE: The following article by Theodore Dalrymple, a prominent British social critic, would tend to indicate that indeed, as suggested by some commenters, the high violence rate in France may be also due to ethnic minorities (although I was unable to find actual numbers). 10/25/2003. SOURCES: International data come from these Interpol documents. U.S. Data by Ethnicity comes from this Deparment of Justice document. Note that it has separate linked pages, and you need to go into it aways. Also you can get raw numbers by clicking on the graphs.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (107869)	4/5/2005 2:18:11 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793915

If you separate out the murders caused by the ghetto-dwellers I've been talking about, the US murder rate is lower than that of Western Europe. It's as plain as day here in DC -- the Washington Post has even done graphics showing it -- overlay the blocks where the murders take place with the racial makeup and demographics, and the correlation is extremely strong. Almost no murders in rich, white Northwest, while the danger zone is poor black Anacostia, and the middle areas have middling rates of danger. I grew up in New Orleans, same thing. If you stay out of the ghetto, you're statistically more likely to live longer. There are some places that the cops don't like to go, even in the daytime (Desire Housing Project, for example.) It's not just racial -- middle class educated black churchgoers are not likely to kill people with guns, either.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (107869)	4/5/2005 10:10:13 PM
From: Bill Ulrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793915

Your observation and your data disagree with each other. Canada has 5x more households with guns (as a distribution) than UK and only 14% more murders than UK committed with that percentage-plethora of guns? Your data suggests, rather contrary to your observation, that Canada would be much much much more safer by taking the durned Canadians out of Canada and leaving the poor guns alone in peace. Seems the Canadian guns are fairly peaceable, whearas the Canadians, themselves... are a wild lot, some14% out of control. No disrespect to Canadians, of course. This is just what happens when observations are poorly drawn from data to make a point that wouldn't pass a freshman level Stats 101 class.