Murder

Murder-rates, that is, intentional murder, are in the news at least every couple of weeks. So, where are all these murders occurring?  We look at world murder-rates data, all of which is online.  Where is the USA, and where are the largest murder rates?  Are murder rates connected with gun ownership, or with corruption?  Questions like these seem to have obvious answers, both yes.

The results tell a different story.  First here is a table of countries with the highest murder rates. The rates given below are per 100,000 people per year. 

Rank	Country	Rate	Count		ZONE
1	El Salvador	108.64	6,656	Americas	Central America
2	Honduras	63.75	5,148	Americas	Central America
3	Venezuela	57.15	17,778	Americas	South America
4	United States Virgin Islands	52.64	56	Americas	Caribbean
5	Jamaica	43.21	1,207	Americas	Caribbean
6	Lesotho	38.00	764	Africa	Southern Africa
7	Belize	34.40	121	Americas	Central America
8	South Africa	34.27	18,673	Africa	Southern Africa
9	Saint Kitts and Nevis	33.55	18	Americas	Caribbean
10	Guatemala	31.21	4,998	Americas	Central America
11	Trinidad and Tobago	30.88	420	Americas	Caribbean
12	Bahamas	29.81	111	Americas	Caribbean
13	Anguilla (UK)	27.66	4	Americas	Caribbean
14	Brazil	26.74	55,574	Americas	South America
15	Colombia	26.50	12,782	Americas	South America

As is evident El Salvador has the highest murder rate by far. The Americas are most represented, though Africa is well represented.  In fact, overall, Southern Africa, as a group, has the highest murder-rates.  The murder rate is the USA is 4.88, well below the halfway mark of all countries.  This makes the USA relatively safe, except maybe Chicago, which accounts for about 4-5% of all murders in the US.   

We ask if there is a correlation with gang activity, and while this may be so, gang population data is difficult to obtain by country. A research question for some PhD thesis for sure.

The countries with the lowest murder rates are located in Europe, though not eastern Europe.  The rates are in the 1-2 murders per 100,000 people.  Canada is also very low, but Mexico has nearly four times the murder-rate as the US. Australia and New Zealand are also very low, in the European range. 

In the interest of keeping this note short we now pose the question of correlation with the prevalence of guns.  Here the USA is tops, by a lot.   The highest rates of gun ownership (per 100 people) are given below.

Rank	Country	Guns per 100
1	United States	112.6
2	Serbia	58.2
3	Yemen	54.8
4	Cyprus	36.4
5	Saudi Arabia	35.0
6	Iraq	34.2
7	Finland	34.2
8	Uruguay	31.8
9	Sweden	31.6
10	Norway	31.3
11	France	31.2
12	Canada	30.8
13	Austria	30.4
14	Iceland	30.3
15	Germany	30.3

Some of the countries with the lowest murder rates have the highest gun ownership.  Consider Finland, a really peaceful country. Lots of guns there.  (Russia, on the other hand, with far less than half the population of the US has about the same total number of murders.) But the above table is just 15 of more than 170 countries for which we found data.  It turns out that gun ownership has essentially a zero correlation with gun ownership.  No connection statistically. This was my first surprise.

Surely the murder-rate must be correlated with corruption.  Seems like "yes" on this one.  However, again, the correlation was essentially zero, my second surprise.  This implies no case can be made that corrupt countries have higher murder rates or vice-versa.  Corruption data comes from transparency-international.

Finally, we examined the wealth disparity of countries as compared with murder rates.  Now we got something.  The correlation there was about 4/10, implying at best a moderate relation.  Loosely speaking, we can say murder-rates are higher when wealth distribution is more unequal, as measured by the GINI index.  BTW, on this index, the USA is about in the middle of all countries.  Haiti has about the highest wealth disparity, i.e. lots of poor with just a few holding all the wealth.

Well, maybe if we considered a correlation  of the incarceration rate with the murder rate.  Surely, the more murders the greater the incarceration?  Here the correlation is a mere 0.26, meaning this correlation is even less than with disparity of wealth.  

The upshot here was a surprise.  I surely would have thought the more guns the more murders.  This is on the news all the time, but it is simply not so.  I could find no strong correlation of murder-rates with any particular factor.

A final note.  Correlation is different from causality!!! Confuse them not.

BTW, worldwide, there are about 390,000 intentional murders each year giving a murder-rate of about 5.34 per 100,000 people.

Note: if you wish to pursue this line of question, note there is a wide difference in the names given to the same country from source to source.

References (a few)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate