Setting the record straight on violent deaths

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For those of you who still think that America, because of it's permissive gun laws, is a place of violence, I give you a French study on the rates of violent death.

For those of you who don't speak French or just don't want to wade through the study, the following are the number of violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants

Russia 221
Ukraine 149
Kazakhstan 119
Colombia 105
Brazil 76
France 75
Japan 59
US 55

France and Japan, of course, have far more strict gun laws than the US. I don't know about the rest.

 

I find those numbers difficult to believe. You sure it is in 100,000 and not 1,000,000? I mean, look at the United States. 55 per 100,000. There are about 300 million people living in the United States, so that 3,000 sets of 100,000. 3,000 X 55 = 165,000 violent deaths per year, or roughly 450 per day. I find that impossible to believe.

 

I do speak some French and the article does indeed claim that there were 151,000 violent deaths in the U.S.A. in the year 2000. However, the definition of violent deaths basically is any non-natural deaths and includes such causes as suicide and accidents.

The number of homicides per 100,000 people in the USA is listed at 6.2 which is 13th in the list of 30 countries studied behind several Central and South American countries as well as several countries that formerly made up the USSR.

France and Japan may appear above the USA on the total violent deaths list but are actually much further down on the homicide list - France is tied for 28th at 0.7 per 100,000 people while Japan is dead last at 0.6 per 100,000 people. It is in the suicide column that Japan (no surprise there really), and to a lesser extent France, has a much higher figure than the U.S.A.

Still all three of these countries are left in the dust by Russia which managed to pull off second place finishes in homicides, suicides and transport fatalities.

 

At the end of the study it says, (With modernisation, homicide decreases, suicide increases) that throughout the 20th century, Americans had about a ten time higher likelyhood to be a victim of a homicide then in any other country at a similar developement stage. And it goes on, that since 1970 until now, the potential of being victim of a homice has dropped about 2.5 times. That is for whites only.

And main contributor to the numbers of violent death, as arleady pointed out by JSBB, are accidents of any kind.

 

OK then. I hadn't considered accidents to be computed in that figure. I can totally accept 450 deaths a day in that case, just based on the number of traffic accidents alone. When they said "violent deaths" I read that to mean "murders" and I couldn't possibly believe that there were 400+ murders a day in the U.S.

 

"then in any other country at a similar developement stage"

That's the weasel phrase, considering that similar development stage is pretty ambiguous. So all of those with higher murder rates are just undeveloped? I don't think so.

And let's not be too quick to dismiss the suicide numbers, kids. It's still a violent death.

 

Well, as far as I know "developed countries" is commonly used to describe a group of countries which are more or less comparable to eachother. And they are a more or less clear group:

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/factbook/orgs/d.html

 

quote:
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"then in any other country at a similar developement stage"
That's the weasel phrase, considering that similar development stage is pretty ambiguous. So all of those with higher murder rates are just undeveloped? I don't think so.
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Of course it isn't. Your post, of course, is attempting to weasel out of the fact that all of the nations (listed in the original post) with more violent deaths than the US are 3rd world states where people live in near anarchy.

And of course it was left out that America is still the #1 country to be murdered, as pointed out by Yago.

But I'm sure you'll blame that on Marylin Manson, or Video games, or whatever.