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by reaperducer 804 days ago
While I do agree this may apply somewhat to the original topic, your dig at suburbanites seems like a mischaracterization. I would expect most other folks are primarily worried about being murdered during the event.

With the murder rate in America near historic lows, I think the person you're replying to is spot-on. It's a lot of hysteria fueled by social media, foreign actors, and the fact that security paranoia is a very lucrative business for a lot of companies.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

Yes, there has been a recent uptick, but it's still 30% below what it was 30 years ago. Heck, it's almost 20% lower than it was 100 years ago.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088644/homicide-suicide...

To find a U.S. murder rate lower than 2014, you have to go back to 1906.

But security companies, alarm companies, conservative politicians and their media partners, police unions, and others with a financial interest foam at the mouth to make it seem like things have never been worse.

2 comments

These statistics do not help anyone create a reasonable personal risk assessment.

Murder is at an all time low! But my sister in law is a drug addict, and last year she got mad so her boyfriend shot and killed a family member right in their nice suburban foyer.

There's more to it than that.

I'm sorry to hear that, but that does match my understanding that there's very few murders done by a random stranger in their own home.

Most people worrying about home invasions arent thinking about it being their niece.

A fascinating finding is that the explosion of cybercrime (against the person, so scams, theft etc) inversely and almost perfectly tracks the fall in violent physical crimes like robbery, hijack, burglary [0].

This leads to the problematic idea that a high tolerance is given to cybercrime because it "shifts" it to a more acceptable form (given that all other factors, policing budgets, causes of crime etc remain constant).

That's one interesting conspiracy/explanation for why rampant digital crime is officially played down whereas almost non-existent street crime is "marketed" by Amazon Ring and other elements of the "Insecurity Industry"

[0] https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/measuring-the-...