Who is more violent? British or American

Non-gun crime is higher in the US as well, just like gun crime is, so blaming it all on the presence or absence of guns seems like a red herring. I think the real answer is that we've got higher poverty rates and inferior social services and less-pervasive law enforcement, all of which contributes to higher rates of crime in general.

The "guns deter crime" argument should not be taken as a magic bullet (if people own guns, nobody commits crime)--it's obviously not that simple--but as a specific inquiry on one person's situation. If you live somewhere where police response times are an hour, are you better off with a 12-gauge in your house or without one? If you live somewhere where police response times are an hour, are you better off with a .357 on your person or without one?

 

Depends if you factor in gun suicides, child death, other accidents and crimes that aren't prevented by having a gun.
As you've said it's more complex than that.
Owning a gun isn't worth it to prevent a break in, that might lose you a couple of grand, if 10 years later you use that gun to kill yourself or one of your kids gets hold of it.

 

MOD hat on again.

Once again, can I ask that we keep this thread off the pros and cons of gun ownership.

I think stats from the USA or UK showing how many injuries or crimes are committed with legally held firearms would be pertinent to this thread. I'm not sure those figures exist though.

 

It's hard to do direct comparisons within the US or between the US and UK because there are multiple variables at work. In the US, places with short response times are all urban and places with long response times are all rural, so you've got all sorts of different variable. Comparing the rural USA to rural Scotland, the main variable is meth. The rural US is in the middle of a meth epidemic right now, and crime related to the distribution of meth, and crime by meth users, is a serious, serious problem. Meth didn't even exist in Scotland until 2007 and it's just not the problem there that it is in, say, rural Oregon.

In light of JWT's post, that's all I'll say on the issue.

 

Meth might not be a problem. But rural Scotland does have a drugs issue. In 2002 heroine seizures were up by 300%.

And back in 1994 the Independent was reporting much of the same thing.

Substance abuse or drug abuse in rural parts of Britain is a major issue still. It just doesn't get talked about.

 

We have a heroin problem in Oregon as well, particularly in the Portland area. Candidly, meth users scare me a LOT more than heroin users do. There's something about the drug that just makes you crazy, brutal, and ruthless. While I recognize that heroin users commit crime too, heroin addicts are more sad than scary to me.

 

I'd say that meth is a HUGE factor in American crime these days. I'm really glad it never really took off here (mind you neither did crack especially).

 

There apparently has historically been a direct link between the laws governing the distribution of pseudoephedrine used in meth manufacture and incarceration rates of major crimes in the US, which was determined accidentally by sociologists analyzing crime trends here. I wish I could easily site my source on that, but it was a documentary I saw awhile ago and I'm too tired to dig around on the Interwebs for a description of copywritten video that satisfactorily explains the methods used in said study. The pharmaceutical corporations had been fighting with lawmakers on the restriction of pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters for a long period of time, and you could see the violent crime rates fluctuate up and down with the waxing and waning of that legal dispute. Apparently there are new "shake and bake" methods for meth manufacture being used that require far less pseudoephedrine now, and the cooks have learned to use "smurfs" more efficiently to secure their pseudoephedrine, so such restrictions no longer decrease the availability of meth as easily as they once did, but don't quote me on that last bit, as I'm terribly under-qualified to discuss it intelligently.

Personally, I believe comparing a heroin addict to a meth addict is laughable in terms of their danger to others. Not even the same league. Tweakers get agitated and hyperstimulated for prolonged periods of time when high, and cause themselves impressive amounts of brain damage after minimal use of the drug. Heroin is a depressant that makes people lethargic and suppresses their breathing, and if their lungs and livers survive the ordeal, the long-term brain damage is substantially less.

Perhaps our friendly neighborhood Christmas bear (Kuma) could chime in with his assuredly vast wisdom on the topic of meth and violent crime correlations in the US in exchange for cookies and belly rubs? Furthermore, I'm sure Hannibal has had to deal with meth addicts on occasion and may have insight as well.

 

In 2010 UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) produced a study on intentional homicide rates by country per 100k citizens.

The US was rated at 4.8 intentional homicides per 100k people here in 2010 (14,748 total). That means 0.0048% of the US population was intentionally murdered that year.

The UK was rated at 1.2 murders per 100k citizens in 2010 (722 total). That means 0.0012% was intentionally murdered that year.

(Evidently there was some variability about the criteria of intention homicide in some countries listed, but I'm assuming the UK/US (and other UN Nations) use a very similar classification.)

[Darker is a higher murder rate per 100k citizens. Notice the US is a shade darker than the UK.]

[Intentional Homicide on Wikipedia.]

If you look back at the older data broken down by previous decades, you see that the US does stay ahead of Europe in homicides by a consistently fair margin in the last century.

So yeah, unequivocally, you are more likely to die by homicide in the US than the UK, both in recent history and presently.

 

Anyone that says the UK is more violent will get a smack from me.

 

I somehow missed the OP's video linked in my sleep deprivation and just read the question when initially responding. Having now seen the video... uh, I question the credentials of Mr. Amidst The Noise's in statistical analysis and sociological training, but that might be mostly due to the hard sell of his message.

Here is a video from Admist The Noise "answering" "who he is" and "what his motives are." It seems to nicely dodge any substance and pump up the hyper-American nationalist rhetoric sufficiently to make me highly suspicious of him. I suspect that more than he is qualified he is predominately a man seeking attention.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DhZCrl7o154"]It's not me, it's you video[/ame]. [I'm pretty sure it's not us, it's him.]

I really wanted him to be wrong about the UK having a lot more violent crime than the US per capita, because then us Americans would have superior street cred on MAP and Mr. Hard Sell would be incorrect, but he may actually have a very valid point.

I'm not sure how consistent the criteria for these classifications are between countries, but Nation Master's Comparison of the US vs. UK Crime states some disturbing information. [Note: you have to mouse over each topic on the list to view the definition and source of the data.]

2.8% of the total UK population are assault victims to the US' 1.2%. The UK has 133% more assaults than the US.

[Source: UNICRI (United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute). 2002. Correspondence on data on crime victims. March. Turin]

0.9% of total UK "female" population are sexual assault victims to the US' 0.4%. The UK has has 125% more female sexual assaults than the US. (These numbers seem to be grossly under-reported from known sexual violence crime statistics against women, but the question is whether they are unreported equally between the US and UK. I assume they probably are.)

[Source: UNICRI (United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute). 2002. Correspondence on data on crime victims. March. Turin]

The US has 25x more "total" incarcerated prisoners than the UK, but only has a population 5x greater.

[The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention)]

The UK has 326x more prosecuted drug offenses than the US per 100k people (so population difference isn't a factor here).

[The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention)]

 

I can't say I'm convinced. The comparative data I pulled from the FBI stats and the BCS told a very different story as I posted above.
You'll forgive me if I don't put up any more stats today, I've spent four hours trawling back and forth through the much harder to read ONS replacement for the BCS and last year's ED data on injuries related to violent crime.

 

Those numbers are so far off I don't think they're even useful for a relative comparison. RAINN places the percentage of American women who are victims of rape or attempted rape at 17%, not 0.4%. Among some demographics (Native American), that percentage is as high as 34%.

http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims

 

Scrolling over the data source on your link John I notice it doesn't give the definition of assaults or the sources of the data used by the UNICRI. Since only 45% of the incidents characterised as violent assaults here involve injury, and the FBI stats I looked at only listed aggravated assaults involving weapons, I think that they have compared aggravated assaults (not including unarmed assaults, murders, robbery or sexual assaults) with our assaults which include all of those plus non violent assaults. That is very easily done. If you did that, based on the figures I've seen, you'll end up with the comparison they've got as opposed to the one I outlined.

 

Wow, whoever is doing the UN's stats gathering need to get fired. We wish only 0.9% of women are sexually assaulted

 

Incidentally the most recent figures here were for 42,976 most serious sexual offences reported to the police in England/Wales. Of the 'estimated' figures, based on a sample base of 5882 women
3% of 16-59 year old women had experienced sexual assault or attempted sexual assault.
4.2% had been stalked.
4.2% had experienced non-physical / non sexual abuse or threats
6.3% had experienced some form of domestic abuse
in the last twelve months. The figures for 'had experienced' were higher.

 

The site you cited is quoting 17% of women being raped over their entire lifetimes, versus the UN study which I assume (I can't find the source of their data) is the successful prosecution of those rapes in a single year (2002).

I'm with JWT on this by default though. Analysis of homicide rates is the most accurate assessment of overall violence between countries. Homicides tend to leave pretty obvious evidence in their wake that consistently gets reported. Varying criteria for assaults, many of which go unreported, not so much.

 

One of the things I've liked about the BCS and its successor CSEW is it reports both the Police numbers of recorded crime and also reports on estimated crime based on surveys, with the inclusion of asking people why they choose not to report crime. It also looks at the data that is gathered by emergency departments and often includes that.

 

Oh my...

Anne Coulter has the answer as to why England has less mass shootings than the US; apparently it's our dislike of "diversity". I know Fox is bad, but blatant racism? (first seconds of this clip)

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A3WB46f-zU&feature=youtube_gdata_player"]YouTube[/ame]