We’ll we certainly have more homicide than any OECD nation. It’s probably relevant that the US is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and religiously pluralistic democracy born in violent revolution. That’s really unusual for a highly economically developed nation. In fact the US is super different from other OECD nations on almost all fronts.
This isn’t a good faith reading of what I’m saying at all.
You could make really a really compelling argument that the US is better thought of as a more economically advanced Brazil rather than a more violent Germany. It seems clear to me that we have a constitutional amendment providing for a right to bare arms precisely because we emerged as a fractious collection of former colonies after armed struggle against England.
but "criminal" depends almost entirely on how a country defines and polices crime, does it not? so all you can do is look at numbers like incarceration rate, no?
I don't believe it is possible to actually accurately determine this. Even if you could define crimes the same across countries, many crimes go unsolved so you wouldn't know if it is one criminal or multiple criminals committing crimes. That was my point. The claim was that incarnation of criminals does not lower crime. I am saying we don't know if that is the case.