Are Americans really 10 times more deranged than Norwegians?

In the past 72 hours, 104 people in the United States were murdered by guns.

On an average day in 2017 in the United States, 47 people were murdered. About 2/3 of them were killed by firearms.

On an average day in 2017 in Western Europe--an area whose population is greater than that of the U.S.--11 people were murdered. Most of them were not killed by firearms.

The United States homicide rate (number of people killed for every 100,000 residents) is nearly 5 1/2 times greater than the Western European homicide rate.

You're 10 times more likely to be murdered in the U.S. than in Norway.

If, as some argue, the problem is not access to guns but rather violent mental illness or just plain badness, are we Americans really 10 times sicker than Norwegians?

Maybe. Every one of the Western European countries has better access to health care than the United States. Every one of them pays a lot less for it, too. (But save us from socialism, right?)

Though maybe America's flood of firearms does have something to do with our homicide rate. Every one of the Western European countries regulates gun ownership more strictly than does the U.S. (But golly, we need a well-regulated militia, right?)

I don't know if Americans are more than 5 times more deranged than Western Europeans. It's easy to think, though, that we're more than 5 times more ignorant. There are proven ways to save a lot of American lives. We could study how other countries reduce violence. Our corrupt leaders, however, don't want us to do that. After all, there's a lot of money to be made in guns and overpriced healthcare. 

P.S. I wrote this several days before the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Here's a link to what I posted the day after those horrific events.

In case you'd like to see how the U.S. homicide rate compares with the homicide rates of 17 European countries, I made this chart.

All data is from 2017. Follow these links if you want to check the figures on homicides, 

European population, and U.S. population.

Violence : It isn't just about the guns

This is not a blog post about gun control. Everything that can possibly be said about that subject, pro or con, has already been said millions of times since Friday. We are talking too much, too soon. In the words of my rabbi, “Judaism teaches that when there is nothing to say we should say nothing….Sometimes only silence gives voice to what has happened."

We Americans should all be sitting shiva.

But when, next week, we rise from our knees and begin working – together, I hope – to reduce the terrible problem of violence in our country, we must realize that our disorder goes much deeper than simply owning too many guns, and that any effective solution will have to go much deeper too.

When they are distressed, some people clean house or do push-ups  I collect data. All week I have been amassing numbers and arranging them in rows and columns, trying to shed light on the question: Why are some nations violent while others are not?

To answer that question would take a lifetime of research and more wisdom than Solomon’s. The best I could do was to look at the homicide rates of the 34 OECD nations, which are the countries that most resemble the United States in culture and economics, and to compare them with rates in other categories. The best I can offer are correlations, not causes.* Here is what I have learned in the last four days.

1. Despite what liberals like myself would like to believe, the homicide rate does not correlate, either negatively or positively, with the gun-ownership rate per se.** South Korea, for example, has a very low gun-ownership rate but a high homicide rate. Austria, Norway, and Switzerland, on the other hand, have relatively high gun-ownership rates but low homicide rates. Japan has low rates all around – very few guns, very few homicides – while the United States has high rates of both gun ownership and homicide.

2. Despite what some preachers (and atheists) have claimed, the homicide rate does not correlate, either negatively or positively, with religiosity. The United States is highly religious and highly homicidal. Japan is barely religious and has almost no homicides. Most nations, though, are an unpredictable mixture of spirituality and savagery.

3. There appears to be some correlation between high homicide rates and a high degree of economic inequality. This seems particularly evident in Mexico, Estonia, the United States, and Chile, who all have lots of homicides and a great gap between rich and poor.

4. The homicide rate correlates most strikingly with three other rates:

• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the more likely it is to have a high rate of military expenditures.
• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the less likely it is to have an effective healthcare system.
• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the less likely its students are to earn high scores in mathematics.

In other words, if you want to identify homicidal OECD nations, look for the ones with the strongest militaries and the weakest social services. 

In case you’re wondering, of the 34 OECD nations, the United States has the third-highest homicide rate. We also have the highest number of guns per 100 residents and the fourth-highest rate of military expenditures (for what is by far the most expensive military in the world). At the same time we have the third highest income-inequality rate. In healthcare outcomes we are in 24th place, and in mathematical achievement we are tied with Portugal and Ireland for 25th place.

Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned us about the path we were taking:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. ... Is there no other way the world may live?

Today President Obama announced that Vice-President Biden will "lead an exploration of options" regarding "the renewal of an assault weapons ban, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and an end to loopholes allowing gun purchases with no background checks."

Such options, if legislated and enforced, might well decrease our appalling homicide rate. They will not, however, reduce our huge military outlay. They will not make our healthcare and educational systems competitive with those of other nations. And until we prioritize people over power, we are likely to continue down our violent path.

--------------------------------------------------
* This research is about correlation, not causation. Two facts - we'll call them A and B - coexist. A may cause B. On the other hand, B may cause A. Some other fact may cause both A and B. Or A and B may have nothing to do with one another. For example, eating chocolate may cause migraine headaches. On the other hand, an incipient migraine headache may cause a person to crave chocolate. Or possibly some alteration in brain chemistry may cause a person both to crave chocolate and to get a migraine. Or maybe chocolate and migraines are totally unrelated. It takes wisdom, common sense, and often hindsight to sort out how, and if, coexisting facts are causally related.

** I have not studied OECD gun laws, so I do not know what kinds of guns are involved in these countries, who can legally purchase them, or what background checks or training are required before purchase. Nor do I know how laws may have changed over the last couple of decades, or how homicide and gun-ownership rates may have changed in response to changed legislation. Any of those factors could affect their homicide rates.

Murder by metaphor

Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom

A public figure is shot. School children are shot. A building explodes. A package explodes. And immediately we look for someone or something to blame: Republicans? The Tea Party? Democrats? Muslims? The National Rifle Association? White Supremacists? The devil? Mental illness?

As Congresswoman Giffords fights for survival, perhaps we'll turn our soul-searching into a collective resolve to practice civility in both public and private discourse. But since we seem to be looking at others' souls rather than at our own, radical transformation seems unlikely.

The sad fact is that all of us are awash in violence.

I believe that political ads featuring targets and crosshairs - whether produced by Republicans, Democrats, or independents - are evil. I also believe, however, that they are metaphorical, not prescriptions for action. Alas, most of us voluntarily surround ourselves - and our children - with metaphors far more potent and pervasive than anything ever produced by a political committee.

The level of violence in even our PG-13 movies would have been unthinkable a generation or two ago (and back then, the special effects weren't nearly so gory, either). Movie previews - supposedly screened for general audiences - feature intrepid heroes and occasionally heroines gunning down the opposition (while driving like maniacs). Video games let adolescents go on imaginary killing rampages. Smaller kids buy action figures. Violent lyrics are common in popular music. TV violence outdoes TV sex. Popular books feature - and often describe in gruesome detail - murder, dismemberment, and rape - and all of these horrors are avenged by - you guessed it - violence.

It would be good if we could conduct debate without resorting to vitriolic ads and talk shows, of course. It would be good if automatic and semi-automatic weapons were available only to military and law enforcement personnel. It would be good if all mentally ill people had access to medical treatment (although, according to a report by the World Psychiatric Association, most acts of violence are committed by sane people, and most mentally ill people are non-violent).

But if we really want to stop the violence, we also need to pay close attention to our daily metaphors - the violent stories that change us for the worse while we think we are merely being entertained.