Re:Staying Competitive: Europe vs. USA (Score 2, Informative)

You are correct, I did not really counter your argument, I merely responded to the contents of your links. Please let me explain my train of thought to you, so you might see, why I did that:

When following your links (I take the first one as an example), first there are the number of total crimes and I could not imagine how you would count that and what kind of crimes such a broad statistic would include. Everything from speeding to murder? Obviously, that might depend heavily on local laws. And as another poster pointed out, maybe some types of crimes are more likely to be reported in one society than in another. But thats a whole different story and I only wanted to point out, why I retreated from comparing total crime numbers to murderers.

Your first link immediately goes on to quote homicides, and there I had one easily comparable crime, which would be defined equally in probably all societies. So I easily compared those.

Also, especially the gunowners link refers most prominently to homicides. So mostly the contents of those links made me post my answer...

And, by the way: I definitely prefer a society where things were stolen from me 5 times and I were killed 0 times, to one where I only lose 1 item to theft while being killed in the process... but that kind of argument is quite inflammatory, so I should immediately apologize for it :-)