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by unixhero 1600 days ago
Uh like the United States is too right? [0],[1],[2],[3]?

0, https://www.dailynews.com/2021/12/28/parents-of-girl-14-kill...

1, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/matthew-wi...

2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

3, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...

3 comments

If by "like" you mean "1/6th as much", then yes. Homicides per year per 100.000 inhabitants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...):

    Mexico: 29.1
    United States: 5.0
    Czech Republic: 0.6
Homicide is a local phenomenon that national statistics don't really convey.

The homicide rate (per 100,000) for a few cities in the US:

    New Orleans, LA - 30.5
    Detroit, MI - 41.5
    St Louis, MO - 64.5
> The homicide rate (per 100,000) for a few cities in the US

And a few in México, for comparison:

Tijuana, B.C.: 134.2

Ciudad Juárez, Chih: 104.5

Uruapan, Mich.: 85.5

(These are also the top 3 in the world for cities not notionally at war, and the next 3, plus one more of the top 10, are also in México.)

The obvious retort is don't go to those cities. I've never heard anyone pitch a relaxing holiday in Juarez.

On the other hand, there are plenty of cities in Mexico with lower rates than major cities in the US. I've had perfectly lovely times in New Orleans and St Louis, despite the murder rate. I've also had perfectly lovely times in:

    Zacatecas 43.0
    Morelia 39.7
    Guadalajara 38.07
...and dozens of other Mexican cities that didn't make the top 50 list so I'm having a hard time finding statistics.

If you're comfortable in Baltimore or Detroit, you should be vastly more comfortable with most of the cities in Mexico.

"Country XYZ has more murder hotspots" is a useless metric. One of the parent comments said "Mexico is a scary place. Violence and or the threat of violence reigns supreme. People are afraid to be outside at night. Every scalable wall is covered either with broken glass or razor wire." That is nonsense, it's a huge country and very little of it looks like Juarez.

Wouldn’t it make sense then to also provide the rates for the worst cities in Mexico?
Weird comment. Your first two links are of accidental and out-of-the-ordinary homicides, which are not really 'scary' or an indication of violent society.
The first two are symptoms, the two last are national statistics. I don't see this as weird, but I will take it, I love being weird!
Your claim and links are the classic example of using scary specific cases and anecdotes to extrapolate an argument while ignoring statistical and general tendencies. Mexico's homicide rate is several times higher than that of the U.S. as a whole and the two countries simply don't compare in terms of insecurity, at all. Nor do they compare in sheer crappiness of police response. People may complain about U.S police having their major flaws (and rightly so in many cases) but the police in Mexico are a whole different story of ineptitude, corruption, danger and in the least case, simply not showing up to do their most basic job. Also, there are many, many mass shootings in Mexico, almost weekly, sometimes even daily in fact, it's just that they garner little or no major media attention and that they happen under different contexts.
While I can agree that it is several order magnitude higher in Mexico. That does not change my point. Also the links from Wikipedia are statistics on a national level, so I am not cherry picking data. Let's remind of what my point is: it is bad in Mexico, AND it is bad in the United States.
I disagree. Generally it is not terrible in the U.S. and it's much, much worse in Mexico. Truly you miss the basic point on the differences between violence down here and what happens up north. There are certain U.S. cities with abysmal murder rates due to certain parts of them, granted, but most people living in most of the country are incredibly safe and can can count on remarkably effective justice/police institutions from their government compared to the majority of what's the case in Mexico. For much of the U.S. murder rates by area or state are at western European levels. Your comparison is off base enough to be a case of whatsaboutism.