Written by Noah Carl.
It is well known that the US has a higher homicide rate than other Western countries. In the latest version of the UN’s dataset, it has a rate of 5.8 per 100,000 — compared to 1.3 in France, 1.1 in Britain and 0.9 in Germany. So the country is at least five times more homicidal than its former colonial ruler.
The standard explanation on the Right is simple: racial demographics. The US has a large black population, and black people (for whatever reason) commit homicide at incredibly high rates. Indeed, the US is about 14% black, while the blackest country in Europe, Britain, is only 4% black. Here’s what Ann Coulter had to say in 2013:
On the gun crimes, we keep hearing how low they are in Europe, and oh they’re so low and they have no guns. If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium. So perhaps it’s not a gun problem. It is a demographic problem.
How she could have known that white Americans commit murder at the same rate as white Belgians is unclear, since Belgium does not publish homicide data broken down by race or ethnicity. Indeed, the evidence we do have suggests that she was wrong. Belgium’s overall homicide rate in 2012 was 1.6. Meanwhile, the homicide rate for non-Hispanic white Americans in the same year was 2.7.