I don’t think most people realize just how dangerous the United States is compared to other developed countries. We seem to brush it under the rug until something hits close enough to home, or we gain an outside perspective that observes the United States from afar.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published a list of rates of intentional murders in countries around the world, based per 100,000 people. The United States had an intentional murder rate of 4.7 murders per 100,000 people. This number may seem low and unimportant, but hopefully listing some of the countries’ intentional murder rates may put things into perspective. Saudi Arabia has a 0.8 murder rate, Australia has 1.1, Libya has 1.7, Iran has 4.1, India has 3.5 and Egypt has a rate of 3.4. Liechtenstein has a rate of zero for intentional murders and Singapore is close behind with 0.2. Relative to these rates, the rate for the United States seems much higher. The most recent data from the UNODC is from 2012, so understandably, some of those numbers have probably changed, but we need to consider our position a serious one, regardless of the circumstances.
People here have a romanticized view on how safe the United States actually is. Tell your parents you’re going backpacking around Europe and they’re concerned for your safety, but tell them you’re going for spring break in Florida and they say have fun. One of those trips is significantly safer than the other – and it’s not the spring break vacation.
To give some perspective on the United States, we need to consider an outside viewpoint. Studying abroad in the Netherlands last semester gave me that outlook. The local news was now the Dutch news and the European news came out of London. I didn’t hear much of what was going on in the United States, but I did hear about the violence.
Europe didn’t publicize news from the United States unless it was big news, yet shootings and police violence came up far more often than I was comfortable with. Seldom did the London Times publicize good news. They chose the bad stuff because it was more interesting to read about. It’s not like we know much more about France other than the shooting that took place in the beginning of January. That’s an example of us receiving a catered view on what Europe is like. We hear about the violence, and that’s it.
I’ve lived in the United States for almost 22 years, and I’ve been receiving this ethnocentric view of Europe and the rest of the world since I could buy the newspaper. But that doctored view of Europe I was receiving for the past five years was not as bad as the catered view of the United States I received while abroad in Holland.
I was ashamed by the amount of continuing violence that was constantly publicized. And apparently, this was nothing new for my European friends. They were already well aware that the United States is a dangerous place.
To go into gun laws would require another column, but I can say this much: gun laws are much stricter in the European Union and for most of Asia. Arguments don’t have the option to escalate to gun violence in most circumstances, which seems to help the case that their nations are safer places to live.
Our conflation of gun ownership with freedom is absolutely ridiculous. There’s no question that I think gun ownership should be much more restrictive, but at this point, it’s ingrained in our culture. If the government took any serious action restricting gun ownership, it would likely cause a small revolution. We live in a pretty great place, but just remember, it’s not as safe as it might seem.
