Re:USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journal...
by Brendinooo on Friday December 21, 2018 @10:06AM
(#18733685)
This is good stuff. You're proving my point: "dangerous" is a value judgment!
Do you live in the US? I do, and I've never felt unsafe in any of the places I've lived in. Maybe I'm 4-5x more likely to be murdered here compared to Germany, but a 0.00535% chance of getting murdered this year doesn't really move the needle for me. I also know that there are wide variances in that rate based on the community I live in, the people I associate with, and the activities in which I partake.
If you think you'd feel safer in North Korea because the murder rate is lower, feel free to live there instead! I'll take my chances here.
Compare this to other countries like Germany or Japan. What are the chances that your schoolkid is going to experience any kind of violence on that level in schools there? Virtually zero.
Take a look at the murder rate for the US and compare to Japan's. For the US, it was 17,250 murders in 2016, a rate of 5.35 (per 100k people). In Germany, they had 963 murders in 2016, a rate of 1.18. In Japan, they had 362 murders in 2016, a rate of 0.28. The US had 4.5 times Germany's murder rate, and over 19 times Japan's!
I'd say it's outright lunacy to think that the US isn't a very dangerous country to live in. Just check out the rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
The US is ranking alongside such nations as Sudan, Ecuador, Argentina, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Kenya. Even North Korea has a lower murder rate; Turkey, India, Rwanda, Egypt, and Iran have significantly lower murder rates than the US. China is downright safe with a murder rate of only 0.62! (Of course, the pollution will probably kill you early there...)
I think the statistics clearly show the US is not a very safe place to live: murder rate, mass shooting rates, gun violence rates, etc. are all extremely high in the US compared to developed nations. And it's likely to get worse, as our elections have shown.