Whenever some whackjob goes buggo with a firearm in the US, you can rely on the talking heads to crank out the usual talking points. One popular one is “there are eleventy bajillion gun murders in the US annually, but only four in Britain,” or stats to that effect. It’s an odd metric: if you are about to be murdered, does it much matter to you if it’s by firearm or by being beaten to death with a bar stool? Heck, you just might rather be shot… but I suspect, given the choice, most about-to-be-a-murder-victim types would prefer to skip the whole “about to be murdered” thing and just go home.
So, what are the murder rates – all murder, not just firearms – in the US and the UK? comparing stats from country to country can be irksome, since each country counts things differently. in the US, if you are murdered, you are counted by the FBI as a “murder victim” and added to the stats appropriately. But in the UK, it appears that you are only listed as a murder victim in the homicide stats if your murderer has been convicted of your murder *and* exhausted all his appeals. Without a murderer, there’s no murder (officially). It’s a strange way to go about it, but it has the advantage of making your country seem safer than it actually is, which is great for PR.
Fortunately, a little while back someone else tried to dig through the number and find out what the actual murder rates are. The US is easy: in 2011, 14,022 homicides out of a population of 292,364,075 gives a rate of 4.8 per 100,000. Th UK, though, is nowhere near so straightforward. The official number was “636 murders “provisionally recorded” for a murder rate of 1.15 per 100,000.” The US looks bad comparatively. But those “provisionally recorded” murders weren’t even close to the total, which may have been as high as 4,700… for a murder rate of 8.5 per 100,000… about *twice* what it is in the US.