A Comparison of Homicide Among Developed Nations
We always hear from the media that the United States leads in its murder rate among developed nations. In fact, I was recently reading a magazine while waiting for an appointment (I didn't think to pay attention to which magazine or issue, so I'm sorry I can't properly cite it) and it said that the United Sates is the most heavily armed and violent nation in the world. It is a fact that we are the most heavily armed, but most violent? Certainly not when compared with everyone else in the world, but are we even the most violent when compared to developed nations?
I was reading a paper written by Dr. Don Kates, who was a professor at Stanford when he wrote the paper, and it discussed the difference in how murder rates are kept between nations, and how culture affects how and who we kill. For instance, he said that in Japan it is common to have "family suicides," which is when a father kills his wife and children, and then kills himself. All of those deaths are listed as suicide. Accordingly, Japan has a very low murder rate, but exceedingly high suicide rate. In fact, he claimed that cultural differences between murder and suicide, when taken into account, put the U.S. far from the top of the list of most violent nations.
I found his statistics hard to believe, so I did some research on my own. I picked 21 countries kind of at random (I picked ones I could find data for, and ones that I thought most people would have some idea of who they were) and compared their murder rates. As you can see from the first graph, we're far and away the most murderous of these other developed nations. No surprise there, the media reminds us of that fact on a regular basis.
On a side note, I found it interesting that we always get compared to Britain's low murder rate - but look at Japan and Hong Kong! They have way lower murder rates than the United Kingdom!
Anyway, next I made a graph to compare the suicide rates among those same nations. The results of this graph were very surprising. The United States - #1 in murder - is number 18 in suicides!
Next, I combined the two rates to see at what rate people "intentionally killed" people in these countries - whether they were killing themselves or another person. The third graph combines the suicide and murder rates to see how we compare in overall killing of humans.
All of the sudden, the U.S. is in the middle of the pack. Especially interesting is that of the two nations with the lowest murder rates - Japan and Hong Kong - one ends up higher than us, and the other is almost even with us when all intentional killing is taken into account.
This definitely calls into question the usefulness of comparing nations when there is not only a wide difference in cultures, but no uniform system for collecting and categorizing data.
But how could the media constantly denigrate the U.S. if they didn't have meaningless foreign statistics to write headlines with?
I was reading a paper written by Dr. Don Kates, who was a professor at Stanford when he wrote the paper, and it discussed the difference in how murder rates are kept between nations, and how culture affects how and who we kill. For instance, he said that in Japan it is common to have "family suicides," which is when a father kills his wife and children, and then kills himself. All of those deaths are listed as suicide. Accordingly, Japan has a very low murder rate, but exceedingly high suicide rate. In fact, he claimed that cultural differences between murder and suicide, when taken into account, put the U.S. far from the top of the list of most violent nations.
I found his statistics hard to believe, so I did some research on my own. I picked 21 countries kind of at random (I picked ones I could find data for, and ones that I thought most people would have some idea of who they were) and compared their murder rates. As you can see from the first graph, we're far and away the most murderous of these other developed nations. No surprise there, the media reminds us of that fact on a regular basis.
On a side note, I found it interesting that we always get compared to Britain's low murder rate - but look at Japan and Hong Kong! They have way lower murder rates than the United Kingdom!
Anyway, next I made a graph to compare the suicide rates among those same nations. The results of this graph were very surprising. The United States - #1 in murder - is number 18 in suicides!
Next, I combined the two rates to see at what rate people "intentionally killed" people in these countries - whether they were killing themselves or another person. The third graph combines the suicide and murder rates to see how we compare in overall killing of humans.
All of the sudden, the U.S. is in the middle of the pack. Especially interesting is that of the two nations with the lowest murder rates - Japan and Hong Kong - one ends up higher than us, and the other is almost even with us when all intentional killing is taken into account.
This definitely calls into question the usefulness of comparing nations when there is not only a wide difference in cultures, but no uniform system for collecting and categorizing data.
But how could the media constantly denigrate the U.S. if they didn't have meaningless foreign statistics to write headlines with?
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