Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is the most violent and dangerous nation in the developed world. This dark view is frequently invoked by conservatives to demand stronger penalties for crimes and by progressives to argue for stronger gun laws.
At the same time, other nations point to crime as an Achilles heel of the American system. These include two peer nations with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world – Australia and Canada. In 2025, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that “the U.S. generally sees higher violent crime rates than many other countries.” Last year, the Canadian Press similarly reported that “the number of police-reported violent crimes for every 100,000 people continue to be higher in the United States than in Canada.”
The data, however, undercuts this narrative. While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.
Regarding homicide, the most heinous crime of all, it’s true that in 2025, the U.S. murder rate was about four per 100,000 people – roughly twice Australia’s and Canada’s 2024 homicide rate. Yet it’s also true that homicides account for only a tiny fraction of violent crime. In 2024, homicides represented just 0.21% of violent crimes in the U.S., based on National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Murder comprises an even smaller fraction of crimes in Australia and Canada.
Murders in the U.S. are usually highly concentrated geographically, often connected to street gang activity, and threaten only a tiny fraction of Americans. Just 2% of counties account for approximately 54% of all murders, and within those counties roughly two-thirds of killings occur within areas covering only about ten city blocks. By contrast, 53% of U.S. counties report no murders in a typical year, while another 16% report only one.
Moreover, when analyzing the incidence of a broader set of crimes, the U.S. is nowhere near the most dangerous developed country.
— John R. Lott, Jr. in Mythbuster: U.S. Much Safer Than Many Peer Nations
Leftists don’t see assaults as violent or criminal. Running around attacking people, setting fires, vandalizing property and as Platner showed us, raping is just how everyday (leftist) folks get through their days.
I read an article a decade or more ago comparing violent crime rates in the US and Europe. I don’t remember where or details, so this is my generic paraphrasing from faded memory. I know the actual numbers are different in detail; tough titty, said the kitty.
Every single EU country had a much higher violent crime rate than the US, lowest being only 3 times as high, most being 5 times as high, and the worst being 7 times as high.
I do not know how EU countries define “violent crime”, how they differ from each other or the US. For what it’s worth, the FBI defines it as the sum of murder, rape, robbery, and assault. How those individual crimes are defined, I also do not know.
There was an urban legend for a while that Britain limited “homicide” to convictions only; someone with a dozen bullet holes but no suspects was not a homicide. I read a takedown of that, quoting actual British law and with several examples of real cases, and it convinced me it was just an urban legend. But it does support the idea that crimes are defined differently in different countries.
In the UK homicides/murders are listed as deaths by misadventure until they get a conviction. I don’t know about the EU in general though.