Comment by janalsncm 13 hours ago
Do you dispute the homicide rate I mentioned? To be more specific, homicide rates are 60x higher in NYC.
To put it another way, it would take two months of living there to match a single day’s risk of being murdered in NYC.
Of course this does not mean fewer rights leads to more safety. Under a bad government, you get nothing in return for your rights. But we should be explicit that there is a tradeoff to be made.
It's not silly to compare, but it is silly to draw causal relationships. Especially when cherry-picking
- Singapore is authoritarian and has a low homicide rate
- Venezuela is authoritarian and has a high homicide rate
But let's also compare Homicide and GDP[0]. There's multiple interesting things to say from graphs like this. Though I still wouldn't conclude a causation here.
People love data when it confirms what they already believe but people don't like putting in the work needed to interpret data. Granted, the latter is not easy. But maybe if we're not math lovers we probably shouldn't claim to also be data lovers.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc?x...
1. The city vs country distinction cannot account for a 60x difference in safety. There are many other countries which are also orders of magnitude safer than both NYC and the US.
2. One person’s “firearm regulation” is another’s authoritarianism. A regulation simply means one’s ability to have a firearm will be taken away in some cases i.e. fewer rights.
3. There is no point where freedom ends and authoritarianism begins. It’s a matter of the types and number of rights which are protected by the government. Anyone who believes removing the right to bear arms in some circumstances agrees that there can be a tradeoff between freedom and safety which was the core of my argument, that the US is becoming less free while becoming no more safe.
I guess it depends what you consider a crime to be. Like suppression of human rights, corporal and capital punishment, and so on.
> Do you dispute the homicide rate I mentioned?
You didn't mention any rate prior and you provide no supporting evidence, multiple sources for each is preferred. Is this supposed 60x higher rate per day or per person?
and as others have said, comparing a city (urban) to a whole country (mixed) is silly
The rate is per 100k people over a year, which is how homicide rates are usually reported. To my understanding, these numbers aren’t disputed.
Singapore is a city and NYC is a city. Of course no comparison will be perfect, but the significant difference in safety will not go away through clever accounting.
> But we should be explicit that there is a tradeoff to be made.
Did you read what I wrote? There is no "tradeoff". Authoritarianism doesn't guarantee crime reduction and it certainly is not the only way to achieve it. I live in a vibrant democracy with low crime and an almost totally unarmed police force (thanks to strict gun control and a public health care system).
1. Comparing a city-state to a city in a large country is kind of a silly exercise. There is no hard border at ("everything's legal in") New Jersey, for example.
2. Singapore has a very different firearm regulation regime than the US (or even New York State or NYC). Your argument could make sense as an argument in favor of more tightly restricting firearm ownership in the US.
3. Your argument doesn't even attempt to generalize to other authoritarian regimes. One could equally compare NYC's murder rate with that of Japan or Switzerland, which did not have to use authoritarianism to achieve low homicide rates.