A frequent criticism of the statistics used by the gun control lobby and folks like Michael Moore use is that the huge disparity in gun deaths in the US vs the rest of the world doesn't take other violence in those countries into account, and doesn't weight the numbers against population. So there, nyah nyah nyah.

Well, here are those numbers, thanks to School of Social Science at UC Irvine's Peace Monitor program.

And guess what? The US still sucks when it comes to violence. You're less likely to get whacked in Uruguay than here.

Americans are more than twice as likely (at 7.9 violent deaths per 100,000 people) to be killed in an act of violence as, say, Canadians (who get offed violently at a rate of 2.7 per 100k), and are still way ahead of Japan (2.0) and England and Wales (which, at 4.2, is even more dangerous than Northern Ireland which rates a 3.4). Even Cuba, with 7.6 offings per 100k, is marginally safer.

But there's a place where violence is ten times as bad as it is here–where 77.4 people per 100k come to a bloody end. And that place is…the Russian Federation. Running a distant second is the Phillipines, which has a violent death rate of 58.1 per 100k. (Israel, by comparison, ranks at 8.3 per 100k–placing it just ahead of Poland and the US).

Wanna live someplace safe? Try Norway, with 1.2 violent deaths per 100k population.

Now, it's concievable that there are places that are even worse than Russia–these numbers are based on data from the World Health Organization mortality database, which only covers 66 countries thoroughly.

But somehow, having just a tenth of the violence of Russia–which has a civil war going on with Chechnya–strikes me as faint praise for American civility.
The only European countries with higher violent death rates than the US are Poland, Portugal (with 15.6/100k! Yikes!), the Republic of Moldova and the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).

By the way, in 2000, my home town of Baltimore had a murder rate of 40.3 per 100,000, which would place it in the #4 position on the world chart if taken separately from the rest of the US–right behind Venezuela.

Now, just because I'm pointing this out doesn't mean I'm for gun control (well, not in the conventional sense, at least). I think the problem is rooted elsewhere… but that's another post.