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A comment on USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists. Parent comment

Re:USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journal... by magduf on Friday December 21, 2018 @10:09AM (#18733714)
>And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. In the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US.

Japan has a large population too, about 120M. But the US has 19 times the murder rate of Japan.

I'm sorry, I don't buy the "large population" canard. Lots of European countries have large populations too: UK, Germany, France, Italy all have ~60-80M each. The US is not an order of magnitude greater than these. China has far more people than the US, yet it only has a murder rate of 0.62, compared to the US's 5.35. Japan's is 0.28. The US has a murder rate that compares with those in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But hey, at least we're not as bad as Brazil or El Salvador... /s

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Re:USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journal... by danielvf on Friday December 21, 2018 @10:17AM (#18733767)
I'm talking about population numbers since it directly affects the odds that your kid would be killed.
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Re:USA added to list of most dangerous countries for journal... by magduf on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:42AM (#18763011)
No, per-capita rates, not absolute population numbers, are what directly affect the odds that anything will happen to you personally. That's why we have per-capita rates.

The only place where per-capita comparisons really break down are for very tiny countries (micronations). When the population is only a few thousand, you can't get good statistical data from that as the sample size is too small, plus micronations just don't compare to real nations for many reasons. But that's not the issue here because we're comparing nations that all have populations well into the tens of millions or more.

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