The vast majority of the US has a murder rate comparable to Canada in fact, while having a huge number of guns.
Last year Chicago's so called top cop said the city has over 117,000 gang members that are part of 55 known gangs. That's merely one example, a few dozen other cities are similarly buried in homicides and gangs.
If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year).
"After dropping to a low point of 1.44 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013, Canada's homicide rate has been rising again.[6] In 2015 the rate rose to 1.68 per 100,000 people, up from 1.47 the previous year.[7] According to Statistics Canada data from 2016, police reported 611 homicides across Canada in 2016, a rate of 1.68 per 100,000 people.[8] Canada's national homicide rate 2017 was the highest it's been in a decade, Statistics Canada says, because of a spike in gang-related violence and shootings. The agency said there were 660 reported homicides in Canada last year. Not only was that an increase of nearly eight per cent from 2016, it also pushed up the homicide rate to 1.8 victims for every 100,000 people, the highest since 2009"
I'm not excluding. There's no point in attempting to do that here on HN, I seriously doubt anybody here fails to at least vaguely understand the condition of US inner cities: they're war zones.
The point is obvious: highly elevated rates of murder in the US are particularly hyper concentrated to a small number of urban zones, to a very abnormal degree. The high US murder rate isn't a comprehensive problem spanning all national population centers. You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though, they shout you down and or run away from it.
You want proof of that? Normalize the murder rate for cities like Chicago, Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis, etc. to that of NYC or San Diego or Seattle or Austin TX circa 2019. Watch how the US murder rate dramatically plunges overall.
St Louis had a 65 per 100k murder rate in 2019. Baltimore was 58. Birmingham was 50. Detroit was 41. Those are war zones. Kansas City and Memphis were 29.
A city like eg Pittsburgh also has serious problems, but it's at least down at 12 (still high by any sane standard). If you reduce the high US murder cities down to just that (ridiculous) ceiling, you'd drop the US murder rate by a lot. Again, concentration is the obvious point, and it's very easy to prove. The obvious question is: what's being done to improve those high murder concentration areas? Not much is the answer.
You can also see this concentration fact in action easily by comparing sections of Chicago or Baltimore, to the overall city murder rates, or the overall state murder rates (for IL or MD). It's not subtle, it's an extreme variance, far beyond what you see in eg Amsterdam vs the Netherlands or Toronto vs Ontario or Canada. It's not normal at all.
The way people try to live in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago or Baltimore, is by entirely avoiding the extraordinarily dangerous areas. If it can be avoided people simply never go to those neighborhoods, they don't drive through there. They're de facto war zones, occupied territory owned by gangs, and everybody knows it (including the police).
And this is the point that absolutely nobody at a high political level in the US wants to discuss, even though to fix the US murder problem you have to start talking about it. How to fix the US inner cities, which are in terrifying condition. You only ultimately fix the inner cities in the US through dramatic concentrated economic improvement, and looking back over the past several decades, neither party has done much of anything about it (the results of that are right there staring at us every day).
> I seriously doubt anybody here fails to at least vaguely understand the condition of US inner cities: they're war zones.
> St Louis had a 65 per 100k murder rate in 2019. Baltimore was 58. Birmingham was 50. Detroit was 41. Those are war zones.
> They're de facto war zones
I won't for a moment pretend that there isn't a huge problem to talk about - there is a very big problem - but I don't feel that this kind of hyperbole is helpful. Not only is it inaccurate, it also serves to demonize the people who live in these places and can be used to justify unhelpful policing tactics.
There are no bombings; there are no troops on the street; it is not occupied territory. We can and should discuss problems in our society without falling into this rhetorical trap.
Out of curiosity, what makes you say "You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though, they shout you down and or run away from it"? Has that been your experience among your friends and family, or on certain web platforms?
You write "absolutely nobody at a high political level in the US wants to discuss." But the pinned tweet on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's Twitter account (https://twitter.com/chicagosmayor) lays out resources and tactics targeted toward specific high-need areas of Chicago to make the city safer (and links to the city's violence reduction strategy which goes into an impressive amount of detail: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/public-safety-and-viol...)
A quick Google search convinced me that this fact has been intensely covered in mainstream news sources, all of which focus on the same problematic cities that you mention, and explores the many contributing factors that make these cities hotspots of violent crime.
Just three examples from the first page of Google results for the unquoted query `homicide rate us cities`:
The reality I'm seeing is that lots of people are talking about urban violent crime hotspots, and that at least some local governments and communities are demonstrably working to address it.
> Out of curiosity, what makes you say "You can't get anybody to talk about this fact though
Turn on showdead and read the things that you can't get anybody to talk about.
The content of the dead comments are the core issues here and how and why that came to be and what to do about it is what this discussion should be about, but until those issues can be discussed openly they can never be addressed productively.
I turned on that setting but legitimately can't find what you might be referring to. Maybe I'm daft, but can you link to "dead" comments? If so, could you link to an example of what you mean?
> If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year).
2021 so far 6 months in: 378 Homicides, 1727 wounded, 2082 shot
Until the gang problem gets solved, nothing will change. And politicians are too busy disarming the law abiding citizens and cutting police budgets instead of focusing on the illegal gang problem.
Texas gets an “F” from Gifford Law Center, yet Houston and Dallas have murder rates that are half of that in Chicago. The rates in Austin and El Paso are tiny when compared to Chicago. All this despite Texas having neighbours with cartels south of border.
2. The age for purchasing handguns (pistols and revolvers) in Illinois is 21 years old. Vast majority of the gang violence and shootings happen using handguns.
3. The state requires gun owners to obtain licenses and face background checks as well as imposing waiting periods on firearms purchases. They also have red flag laws.
> Bonus points of you can do it while blaming mental health AND justify our decreased spending on mental health. The mic is yours.
This along with rest of your snide comment indicates to me that you have some pre-conceived incorrect assumptions about me and therefore I am not entertaining you.
You expressed a rather simplistic view of a much larger issue, stating a single problem as the core. I didn't judge your opinion untill you provided it, therefore it can't be preconceived.
As a gun owner, I'm fully aware of the complexity of the issue. Pointing at socioeconomics as the root is naive. It ignores the vast majority of incidents to focus very narrowly on one factor. The reality is if you only look at the one instance and ignore the whole, you cannot address the actual problems. Socioeconomics have nothing to do with almost all of our mass shootings because most of them aren't gang related. It doesn't account for most homicides by gun because they're individual issues.
We country divided politically, racially and sexually (gender, not intercourse) and pretty free access to firearms. Wanna guess what happens when people don't like each other or have heated arguments and have guns? Hint: shooting.
So sure, try and solve for the one thing and ignore all the rest. You can't solve for it because you're dealing with historically unrepresented populations of people that we've shoved into a corner together and we basically ignore. You wanna actually solve for all the killing we do? Make access to firearms require more than just a pulse.
It's not both. The root cause of most of these killings is honor culture, which existed in plenty of societies before guns and led to just as many killings.
Well certainly that's one required aspect of many.
I've yet to see a single serious national proposal for hoovering up the vast number of illegal guns from the inner cities however. The 117,000 gang members in Chicago do not care about gun permits or background checks.
The gun control measures being proposed - exclusively by the Democrats - won't do anything to stem the near-genocide rate of murder in US inner cities.
The actual big target is: opportunity, jobs, wealth. If you don't fix that in the US inner cities, you won't stem the murder, gang participation and rate of violence. There also isn't much being done about that equation in the US inner cities.
Visiting/exchange doctors come here to pick up skills for combat zones because so many ER trauma shifts are going to have gun shot wounds. And if it's the work of the untouchable assault rifle, well, you are going to be learnin', boy!
In large parts of the US you can get away with things that any other country would call murder or manslaughter, just by claiming that you were frightened or fearing for your life.
Outside these gangs, what is the murder rate like though? Surely still many times higher than Canada or Europe with all the rednecks and white supremacists and school shooters.
Last year Chicago's so called top cop said the city has over 117,000 gang members that are part of 55 known gangs. That's merely one example, a few dozen other cities are similarly buried in homicides and gangs.
If you actually wanted to do something about the US murder rate, it's very obvious where to begin fixing things. Nobody wants to talk about it, it's not a national discussion at all, it just keeps getting swept under the rug (while the dead bodies pile up, year after year).