To the down voters, yeah the SF homicide rate is high for a developed country, but thank goodness it’s only half as bad as the US as a whole. If you plan to stay in the US where do you plan to move to that’s actually safer?

Well, where I live in the US, the homicide rate is way less than half of SF, I have never been accosted by a tweaker, never seen a carjacking, never seen or heard of a mugging, closest homeless/panhandling person I have ever seen was about 5 miles away (friendly and polite dude), and perhaps most importantly the only crap I see on the sidewalks tends to be avian in nature.

Where do you live? There is of course a lot of crime nearby me in SF but it's pretty dense so its spread across a large number of people so my personal risk is low. (There's maybe a million people in a 5 mile radius.)

Sadly most of the country has even weaker gun control so doesn't enjoy the relative safety of living somewhere like San Francisco where there are only four times the number of homicides compared to the UK/France/Germany. (4.5 homicides per 100k in SF vs 6.3 homicides in the US and 0.8-1.2 homicides per 100k in UK/France/Germany.)

Edit: Fixed SF crime rate to use full year figures since Wikipedia incorrectly links to half year figures.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

I choose not to disclose my location on HN, but will say it’s on the rural outskirts of a larger metro area with a multi million population. There are areas within the metro with higher crime, but no where near SF.

I would argue that our lack of stricter gun control laws is why we are safer here. Almost everyone I know is armed in their home, and at least 33% of folks I know concealed carry. I realize that here on HN that statement will likely get me downvoted, but there is a reality to the preventative nature that being able to provide deadly defense to crime that I have experienced.

Strange then that the states with laxer gun laws have more homicides.

I’d have to see a reputable source on that statistic. The sense I get is places like Chicago, NY, Baltimore, other larger urban centers have some pretty strict firearms laws and still tend to have high homicide rates. Do those skew the numbers for the state?

As an example: Illinois may have lax state laws, but Chicago has strict gun laws, and lots of homicides. If you removed Chicago from Illinois statistics, how would that affect the state’s statistics

While a little more dangerous than SF, at 5.5 homicides per 100k NYC is still safer than the US as a whole.

Chicago is bad at 18.26 homicides per 100k. I guess citywide controls have limited impact if people can just drive out to the burbs to buy a gun.