Quote:
Originally Posted by anticipation
Yeah but you have to look at this in context. All of these states have relatively small populations that artificially inflate their murder rate, with the exception of Georgia, that most big cities in the U.S. surpass in terms of people murdered or injured by gun violence. In this country, places like Chicago, Baltimore, and D.C. have more people killed due to gun violence than most of those states will in total. So far, the city of Chicago has had over twice as many people killed (228) this year alone than the entire state of Alaska had in 2011, yet the murder rate in the latter is nearly 3 times higher. Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, with handgun bans and automatic/semi-automatic bans in place for the better part of the last decade. So then why do we consistently rank among the most violent cities in the country? People will kill each other regardless of whether the laws are strict or lax. There already is a huge illegal gun market, and further restricting the supply only serves to fuel that market. It's kind of like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
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How does a small population "artificially inflate their murder rate"? The murder rate is
per capita, nothing artificially inflated about it. Comparing just flat numbers without taking population into account is comparing apples and oranges—
that artificially inflates the numbers. Your comparison of Alaska and Chicago is a perfect example of this. There are four times as many people in Chicago as there are in the entire state of Alaska so, yeah, Chicago is going to have more total numbers of crimes—or Xboxes or pregnancies or cases of the flu or most things you can think of. That's why we compare things like crime on a per capita basis—how much crime happens per person in that area—because it's a much more accurate way of comparing different places to each other.