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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

> will switch to knives and screwdrivers as we see in the UK

London, with a population of ~8 million has the same murder rate as new Orleans, which is 300k people. Not as in x murders per 100k, but as in total murders in a city.

In terms of knife crime the USA has a slightly _higher_ rate of knife crime than the UK. Bear in mind the UK counts attacks with knifes as knife crimes, where as the states only appear to include death by knives.

Which means that even if you took away gun deaths (~70% of all us homicides) you're still more likley to be stabbed in the USA compared to the USA.

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If we want to compare cities to New Orleans, then you might as well compare them them to Birmingham. Even with firearms being banned you have a murder rate of 28/100k vs 40/100k. Violent crime between the cities is actually equal at 55/1k.

Yeah, stabbing deaths UK vs US is about half (175/70M UK vs 1600/350M US). But if comparing at the national level, 360/100k US vs 1200/100k UK.

So it really comes down to each person's systems thinking approach and which stats they care about.

> 360/100k US vs 1200/100k UK.

Sorry but 1200 knife deaths per 100k means the annual rate would be 840,000 murders a year.

last year the total number of murders in the UK was ~600 which is .86 per 100k

(far less than the _gun_ related homicides in the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/28/what-the-...)

The reason why I was talking about knife homicides specifically is that comparing knife crime between the us and the uk is hard. the UK systematically records crimes where knives are involved at a national level, the USA doesn't really.

But brum has a murder rate twice that of the national average. Even so its not 28/100k its around 1.25/100k which is still just over a quarter of the _national_ gun homicide rate of the entire USA.(~4.3/100k)

The point is, the UK is demonstrably less murderous than the USA. Even the UKs most murderous city is safer than Sanjose, which accordign to the stats I can find has a 3.2/100k murder rate.

"360/100k US vs 1200/100k UK"

That's the violent crime rate.

I do see the 28 was an error.

Yes, lower murder rate, but higher violent crime rate.

Lets not forget the UK defines violent crime as any sort of threat, shouting at someone in the street is violent crime.

The US defines violent crime as literal murder.

Those are no way near comparable.

Yes I should have made that clearer at the start, I deliberately avoided "violent" crime as the stats are very hard to compare like for like.

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