chuckman1 said:
this is a question mainly directed to Europeans but also a bit to Africans and Asians.
Do you think that the United states are violent or scary and crime ridden? I know globally we look good, but compared to rich European countries we may seem like the ghetto. also most of Asia and some of Africa has lower murder rates. The only European countries I can think of with more murder are more corrupt or Russia.
I know my friend from ghana thinks were these crazy barbaric drug addicted violent people. Is that sentiment common?
Violence in the us is half what it was 20 years ago, but in the hood gunshots are a fact of life.
Simply, what do all you guys think of American violence? Are we violent? A lot of our music talks about shooting down your enemies.
Is this just the way it is in a county that was born from violent revolution.
Bonus: also interested in the perspective of other Americans (Mexicans, Chilean) and especially Canada since you guys seem like the cousin who succeeds better at everything.
Edit: plus there's our tendency to invade anyone that can make us a profit for vague reasons as long as the world doesn't all denounce if.
Well, to be honest if you ask a question like this it's of course going to lead to a lot of Anti-Americanism, especially from our rivals, sometimes with hilarious results.
At the end of the day the US is probably one of the least violent countries on earth, but that goes for most first world nations as well, and these kinds of questions tend to only wind up involving the most civilized first world nations. Compared to 90% of the world first world "white" countries are very stable and peaceful compared to Africa, most of Asia, South and Central America, and of course The Middle East, of course a big part of the problem is that news from those parts of the world is spotty at best, and while known to be torn with violent conflict it's impossible to really gauge the extent especially as many of these parts of the world try and present themselves as something else.
A lot of the violence that takes place in the US ultimately comes down to behavior from other countries. As one of the wealthiest countries in the world, as well as one with very open borders and a generally accepting society we welcome international trade, and this makes smuggling and crime relatively easy for people to engage in as they bring some of the few things actually illegal in the US like drugs into the country. Being relatively healthy as well, despite pretensions to the contrary, we're also routine victims of human trafficking. One of the reasons why an American girl can be so valuable on the global market isn't just because of the "exotic" appeal given that whites are actually one of the less common ethnicities globally, and it isn't because of the political power trip, but because of simple things like our quality of vaccinations and health care especially during early childhood. Americans might arguably eat ourselves into obesity but we also carry it fairly well society wise, and before people get into that our infrastructure is top notch. Just the vaccinations an infant can get in the US can arguably be worth a fortune in other parts of the world and guarantee a degree of resilience, which can be valuable if your going to say put a girl into slavery in a whorehouse. It's a point I've had explained to me before and I probably wouldn't have thought of, and results in say Americans and a lot of other people from the first world netting sometimes as much as ten times the going rate for say a domestic human product assuming they bring someone in who is in good shape/pretty/whatever to begin with. The point here being that a lot of our violence has to deal with people bringing it into this country for financial reasons, we've pretty much got every kind of gang and international syndicate present in the US and holding territory somewhere, where other nations usually tend to be a lot less open and thus don't deal with quite as much on such a large scale. Down near our borders for example where a lot of the worst violence takes place it's largely coming from Mexican cartels (which Mexico itself acknowledges are a problem) who want to bring drugs into the US, and of course they just don't run into Law Enforcement but other people from literally around the world who want to do the same bloody thing.
A lot of our other violence largely comes from tolerance as much as anything, as these "commonly heard gunshots in the hood" largely come from allowing say the black counter culture to flourish. Right here in these forums we argue about facets of this all the time, and that's just one internal cultural problem. Other nations that have more stability, including first world ones, might pretend otherwise but have less hesitation in putting boots up asses and not caring about things like political correctness the way the US does. The kind of race warfare crap that we see the media dredging up, and the antics of guys like Al Sharpton simply wouldn't be tolerated elsewhere, which is one of the reasons why these people limit themselves largely to the US. Of course this isn't to say the rest of the world is devoid of this kind of thing, they just don't air their dirty laundry as much. For example we've had massive Islamic riots in nations like France, and it was what two years ago that we have massive youth riots in the UK? The thing is that other countries don't harp on these kinds of things and prefer to forget them, the US on the other hand loves sensationalism so if something happens people are going to bring it up in the media every five minutes to get a rise out of people. This tends to present an illusion that things are a lot worse in the US than they are elsewhere. For example we've taken "Freedom Of The Press" to the point where we allowed the American media to pretty much plaster "Ferguson" everywhere and since it was getting attention it's inspired people to raise similar incidents elsewhere. At the end of the day even with four buildings burned down Ferguson wasn't crap compared to what I saw of those riots in the UK and some of those Islamic riots, the difference is that we're still talking about it and inspiring copycats where other countries prefer to try and forget it and move on, and sure as hell don't let the media glorify it to encourage every media outlet to find their own little bit of similar controversy and see if they can feed an explosion for ratings. Don't get me wrong, freedom of the press is a noble sentiment, but also understand that despite their pretensions otherwise most of the world, including the civilized world, doesn't actually practice freedom(s) the way the US does, which is both a good and a bad thing, and leads to a lot of our turmoil since we both can't keep domestic rabble rousers in line very well, and we also make it so we pretty much see a version of every conflict on earth playing out in our back yard.
It's not uncommon in some forums and chat rooms to hear people, especially from Europe, talking about how the US seems to be on it's way of becoming a third world country because of the people we let run wild, and there is some truth to that, though for the most part we do manage. At the end of the day our relatively loose gun laws (which aren't as loose as many people think anymore, it varies state by state, some like Arizona are very free with guns, others like Connecticut not so much) have minimal impact because the kinds of people causing the problems are going to arm themselves illegally if they can't do it legally, as shown by many of these same people operating much the same way elsewhere in the world. Basically The Russian Mob doesn't give a crap about anyone's gun control laws, neither do Mexican Border cartels, however only in the US are you likely to see these two forces start shooting at each other, and a dozen other similar organizations, all trying to carve out and control valuable smuggling territory. I mean in parts of the country you can literally see competing crime groups with origins on the other side of the bloody planet, mention some of these guys in say Europe and they would be like "Who is that? Never heard of them" because they just never left the doors open the same way.
The bottom line though is that for the most part things remain relatively peaceful due to these groups all being in business and working things out one way or another. I can see why people have the impressions they do of the US due to our media, but at the same time I don't think we're really that much worse off than most of the rest of the world, we just love to sensationalize our dirty laundry. The slight differences are also balanced by the simple fact that no other country really allows the same degree of freedom as the USA despite pretensions, and freedom comes at the cost of less social control. For the record I do think we should embrace some of the attitudes of Europe in being a bit less tolerant of counter cultures (at least in practice, if not in lip service), and find ways of "encouraging" our media to stop airing our dirty laundry to the globe non-stop. I mean cover the problems fine, but six months later we shouldn't have the media still harping on an incident and talking about all these similar incidents happening which largely occurred because they kept covering it and now people want attention. Of course in the US if you so much as suggested we put some of the laws people take for granted (or don't think about) in say the UK into force people here would start screaming about oppression and Nazism... which I think is hilarious, especially on the latter point, since a lot of people here tend to compare the generation of the 1940s and their mentality to Nazis when those are the guys who defeated the Nazis... but that's a whole different discussion, and really the point here isn't for me to rag on SJWs.
