> If, statistically, America is so screwed up that you need to compare to Brazil and Mexico before the numbers start looking sort of reasonable, there may be a correlation with gun ownership the way that smoking may be correlated with cancer.
Compared to Mexico and Brazil, the US numbers look fucking awesome.
Compared to Greenland and Argentina, the US numbers look perfectly reasonable.
Compared to France, maybe we look bad. But compared to Japan, even France looks bad.
If I was trying to convince the French to reinstate the death penalty by pointing out that their homicide rate was 4-6 times as bad as Japan, and the French said “yeah but our homicide rate is 1/4 that of the US”, they would have a point. Single factors that map onto popular political controversies aren’t as big a factor as broader social and cultural factors. If you look at those factors, Japan is not a comparable country to France and France is not a comparable country to the United States.
Basically your argument boils down to: The USA is substantially an undeveloped shithole full of corrupt/ineffectual law enforcement, barely functional or legitimate government, broke unemployed people incapable of solving problems peacefully with nothing to lose, and powerful thugs beyond the reach of the law, so we should feel great pride that we aren’t quite as violent and dangerous as places where the gangsters are the primary source of local force and the law enforcement / military are essentially gangsters themselves.
I guess....
But on the flip side, the USA is almost incomparably richer than those countries (in natural resources, infrastructure, human capital, ...), has a much better developed and more legitimate set of public institutions, has a tradition of settling disputes via political/legal processes instead of gang warfare, and in most ways looks much more like wealthy industrialized countries than new developing-country slums.
So, instead of giving up and patting ourselves on the back because it could always be worse, as an alternative we could, y'know, try to get the most desperate people access to basic essentials required for human flourishing, and aim to reduce the levels of violence and corruption over time, the way people have successfully done in many other countries around the world.
> Basically your argument boils down to: The USA is substantially an undeveloped shithole full of corrupt/ineffectual law enforcement, barely functional or legitimate government, broke unemployed people incapable of solving problems peacefully with nothing to lose, and powerful thugs beyond the reach of the law, so we should feel great pride that we aren’t quite as violent and dangerous as places where the gangsters are the primary source of local force and the law enforcement / military are essentially gangsters themselves.
Compared to Mexico and Brazil, the US numbers look fucking awesome.
Compared to Greenland and Argentina, the US numbers look perfectly reasonable.
Compared to France, maybe we look bad. But compared to Japan, even France looks bad.
If I was trying to convince the French to reinstate the death penalty by pointing out that their homicide rate was 4-6 times as bad as Japan, and the French said “yeah but our homicide rate is 1/4 that of the US”, they would have a point. Single factors that map onto popular political controversies aren’t as big a factor as broader social and cultural factors. If you look at those factors, Japan is not a comparable country to France and France is not a comparable country to the United States.