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Comment by MartianSquirrel | Hacker News Reader

Which is exactly why I'd rather visit Egypt than the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...)

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As thaumasiotes points out, the overall homicide rate is not the most relevant when selecting where to be a tourist. For instance, between 2012 and 2015, 15 and 5 British citizens were murdered in the US and Egypt, respectively

https://www.quora.com/How-many-tourists-have-been-murdered-w...

even though ~3M brits visit the US each year but only ~50k visit Egypt. So we can be pretty confident the murder rate for British tourists is at least an order of magnitude larger in Egypt.

Tourists are distinctive enough that you could probably usefully use the rate of intentional homicide of tourists rather than the rate of intentional homicide of anyone, though I doubt those statistics are kept.

Egypt sees tourists as vital enough that one of the purposes of the police is to specifically look out for the well-being of nearby tourists, so probably pretty good on that metric.

Yeah, you probably have a lot of information about yourself that can be used to best a much more accurate estimate of being the victim of homicide. For instance, the homicide rates in different US states span an order of magnitude.

Fascinating data. There's a breakdown per-state showing that only eleven states have a lower homicide rate than Egypt.

Looks like Puerto Rico, District of Columbia and Louisiana are the worst as of 2012 (latest the set shows unfortunately). Puerto Rico is an outlier at 2x the next, but District of Columbia has improved massively between 2000 and 2012.

EDIT: This might be a bit misleading. While there is more recent data for the US (up to 2016), there seems to be no reliable data on Egypt post 2012. Additionally, the 2012 number (2.5) represents a 4x /increase/ in homicides since 2003 (0.6). Only 2011 (year of the Egyption revolution) was higher at 3.2. So there's a clear trend towards an increase in homicide rates that might not be accounted for.

That said, I guess it's unlikely that the number is much higher than the US average, even discarding the outliers mentioned above.

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