Getting Murdered: Where in the World?

A couple of days ago I received an email from one of my correspondents, Shirley C. to be specific, and therein was a list of countries with murder rates greater than the U.S. Quite a few there were. But my curiosity was piqued, and I was sucked into another paroxysm of impulsive number crunching. Well, something to that effect. Here are the results.

First, there’s my reconstruction, reordering and summarizing of the murder rates from various regions of the world:

A couple of minutes’ scrutiny of the table makes it obvious that the highest murder rates are in sub-Sahara Africa and Latin America. If Mexico were not included in the North American stats, our rate, including the U.S., would be below 4.0 murders per 100,000 of population.

The ethnic/cultural implications veritably scream for consideration, but that would be, of course, racist. Perhaps this post will qualify me for consideration as such. But it does appear that guns, when it comes to murder, at least on a planetary basis, are much less of a factor than the civilizational advancement of a particular locale. I leave it to astute readers to decide for themselves how the variation of same within the conterminous United States and its population centers is a factor in local murder rates.

If you wish to see country-by-country details of the murder rate stats, the full spreadsheet is available here for downloading or perusal.

One more thing, if guns are such a defining factor in murder rates, why has the Obama Administration sent full-automatic assault weapons to Mexico, a country with a murder rate nearly five-times that of the U.S.?

Just asking.

SOURCE

Dennis is too cautious to spell out in full the implications of his data but perhaps I will go a little further by noting the high deathrate in African countries and also noting that the USA is to a degree an African country, in some parts very African  --JR