Everyone *knows* that the USA is a more violent country than various socialist countries in Europe ... or Canada. Right?
Well, perhaps, once again, what "everyone knows" just ain't so, after all.
Here is an interesting news item in the online version of the British tabloid The Daily Mail: The most violent country in Europe: Britain is also worse than South Africa and U.S.
Assuming that one can trust *any* government's statistics (or that one can trust newspapers), here are the figures for violent crime as reported in the article --
1 UK .................... 2034/100,000 residents
2 Austria ............. 1677
3 S.Africa ............ 1609
4 Sweden ............ 1123
5 Belgium ............ 1006
6 Canada ............ 935
7 Finland ............. 748
8 Netherlands ...... 676
9 Luxembourg ..... 565
10 France ............ 504
?? USA ................. 466
?? Australia .......... 92
Various countries report crime differently (various jurisdictions within the US compile and report crime statistics differently). Some countries (or local jurisdictions within those countries) "solve" their crime problems by either decriminalizing certain behaviors ... or by simpy not recording some of the individual crimes.
My point is, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, we don't know how much salt to apply to any of these numbers individually.
By the way, this result is not a real surprise to me -- I have long known that what "everyone knows" in this regard is false. The only thing which mildly surprises me is the great distance between reported US violent crime and Canadian violent crime.
As a side point, if you'd like a view of how "liberals" will almost invariably react to these figures, check-out the responses to my posting of this.
Friday, July 3, 2009
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3 comments:
Doesn't surprise me in the least, out here we have gun control and all sorts of weapons controls, yet the statistics tell us that more and more are bashed, beaten, raped, robbed etc. The media hides most of it, so the masses think it's all good.
The difference between America and the other countries in that list is that if you want to protect yourself with a gun, in America you can, in most of those other countries, you can't.
It is common sense that this would be the case, but then, common sense was never something that gun grabbers and leftists had.
You're in Australia, right?
That vast difference between the reported violent crime rate for Australia and that reported for other countries sure does cause me to raise my eyebrow (the left one, to be precise, since that's the one I can most easily raise independently).
http://lippard.blogspot.com/2009/06/republican-states-lead-in-divorce-teen.html
By this of course he means "those areas that are mostly religious or have lip service to religion."
In other words, the more religious an area, the worse that a wide range of stats will show up.
Teen pregnancy, porno subscriptions, murder, adultery, divorce, etc.
Any input on THESE kinds of stats.
Also, there is the famous Gregory S Paul study that says that more secular nations like Sweden have better infant mortality stats, smaller teen pregnancy rates, etc.
In other words, religion fosters more hypocrisy than good????
Let me know your input on the Lippard character. Seems he's on a smackdown of religion, and I must add that whatever else the case, he IS very sophisticated at that and erudite.
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