Why we feel like America is going to hell

[theknuckler]

http://www.calgaryherald.com/busines...382/story.html

A very good read IMO.

The population of the United States is 311 million, far more than in any other developed country (which is the peer group within which meaningful comparisons can be made). For that reason alone, we should expect to see far more mass murders in the U.S. than elsewhere. Four times more than in Germany. Five times more than in the United Kingdom. Nine times more than in Canada.

And rampages certainly do happen elsewhere. Norway, infamously. Germany, Australia, Japan. In 2010, a man in rural England murdered 12 people. In 2001, a man shot up the legislature in Zug, Switzerland, killing 14 people. In 2009, during a national holiday, a man slammed his car into a crowd, killing seven, in a quiet town in the Netherlands. In 2006, Canada was torn by the Dawson College shooting.

Then there was the time a student went on a rampage at a college, killing 10 people. No, I don’t mean the Virginia Tech massacre. I mean the 2008 incident in Finland, which happened less than a year after a shooting at a Finnish high school, which took the lives of eight people.

Most of us have forgotten these incidents, or never heard of them at all, because the United States is the media centre of the world — particularly the English-speaking world — and murders outside the U.S. get a fraction of the attention devoted to American tragedies in the American media and media around the world. (The sole exception was Anders Breivik’s massacre in Norway, which featured an unprecedented number of fatalities and unsettling political overtones.) It’s hard to exaggerate just how much that distorts reality.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/fe...#ixzz21ZBPwE6C

[Stevens Lindros]

Very good point but there's no denying that the US murder rate is MUCH higher, ignoring population.