The distinction you're looking for doesn't exist. The two sentences would be considered equivalent by anyone who isn't wildly over-attuned to political correctness issues.

I don't agree with that, and it's relevant to this forum in an important way. There's a wide spectrum between my saying "that's false" or "you're mistaken", vs. saying "you're a liar". The distinction here is a similar one.

It doesn't need to be a moral distinction. When negative statements are made neutrally, discussion goes much better than when they are made pejoratively. This entire site, if not the entire internet, is evidence of that.

I'm afraid I genuinely don't see the difference between the two sentences Dan, it's not an attempt to be awkward. I'm sure if you fed them into a mechanical parser/semantic analyzer they'd reduce to the same predicate logic.

Let's start by agreeing that "Americans" and "American people" are equivalent, at least when discussing statistical facts about populations. Then the two sentences can be rewritten as:

"the homicide rate amongst the American people is much higher than amongst the Swiss"

and

"American people are more homicidal than the swiss"

or taking out the nouns:

"the X rate amongst Y is much higher than amongst the Z"

vs

"Y is more X than Z"

which I am 100% sure, if put to people in a neutral poll, would be considered the same.

But I'm also mystified as to the wider goal. TheDong admits the two constructions are similar, yet his reaction is extreme - one is fine and the other triggers calls for banning people completely, labels of "hateful and divisive" and so on. That kind of unpredictable and over the top behaviour triggered by almost non-existent differences in phrasing is negative to Hacker News, and clearly violates the various guidelines about reading what people say in good faith, let alone the one about reacting to the strongest possible interpretation!

Given that TheDong knows how similar they are, one must wonder what the purpose of treating them so differently is.