sindatur wrote:Cail wrote:Yup. England's violent crime rate's higher than ours.
Yea, I'm not really into either, but, I think I'd rather be shot dead then knifed or bludgeoned to death
Got to be very careful with the notorious "England is more violent than the US" meme.
The UK was widely reported a while back as being between 4 - 8 times more violent than the US, based on official crime figures released by the UK Home Office on one side and the FBI on the other. This of course turned out to be a complete and utter nonsense. The FBI were only counting four categories of crime - namely murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault - as violent crimes, whereas we Brits included all “crimes against the person,” including simple assaults, all robberies, and all “sexual offenses”.
Nobody has yet made a like-for-like comparison - the best guess so far is that the USA has 466 violent crimes against the person per 100k of population, whereas the UK has 776. So yes, we are apparently 1.74 times more prone to commit violent crime over here.
A statistically-based good debunk of the "UK's way more violent" urban myth
is to be found here.
However, Sin, your assumption could not be more wrong when it comes to murder. The overall UK homicide rate is 1.2 per 100k of population, whereas the US is somewhere between 4.5 and 5.3 per of 100k population, depending upon which set of official data you take... so the likelihood of being murdered is between 375% - 440% higher in the US. Bear in mind that's homicide by any means, not just firearms, where the likelihood of being shot dead is between 43 and 51 times greater in the US... but then again, dead is dead, so method doesn't really matter.
So don't cancel your UK holiday yet, Sin. Okay we're more likely to beat you up over here - but far FAR less likely to kill you by any method.
![Big Grin :biggrin:](./images/smilies/biggrin.gif)