The homicide rate in the US is about 6-7 times that in the UK per 100,000 population. I'd take our situation any day of the week.
Last time I looked into this properly, knife crime in the US was actually roughly the same frequency as that in the UK. The difference is that knife-based murders stand out in the UK, whereas in the US nobody pays attention because the problem is dwarfed by the much greater problem of rampant gun crime.
The UK is a society where violent crime is pretty uncommon. The homicide rate in the UK was 1.0 per 100,000 population in 2023. That has been broadly trending downwards in recent decades, after rising during the late 20th century and hitting a peak at c1.8 per 100,000 in 2003. The US is a much more violent society: their homicide rate is around 6.4 per 100,000 population.
Killers are always going to find weapons - if you ban guns they'll find knives, if you ban knives they'll kill with something else. One difference is that a killer on a knife rampage is going to kill a lot fewer people before they're stopped than a killer with a gun. I guess killing with a knife is a more 'involved' act than just pointing a gun and clicking the trigger, so the bar for someone stabbing with a knife is probably a bit higher than killing from several metres away with a gun.
But part of it is a societal thing - my hunch is that (in relative terms) society in the UK and most other rich Western liberal democracies just instills in people an instinctively higher value on human life. You see it in US exceptionalism in use of the death penalty, the frequency of police killings, etc. I don't want to exaggerate the difference - the US still has far fewer murders than Colombia or South Africa or Brazil - but there are other Western countries like Canada or Finland where guns are still pretty widely owned (albeit not quite to the extent of the US) that don't have the same problem of violence as the US.
Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/gfSkR
Human-rights lawyers hope to close some gaps in international law, whether by new agreements (some call for a special tribunal to prosecute Russia for aggression) or by existing courts extending their remit. They also want new curbs on ai and autonomous weapons. But they cannot hold back states bent on violence. Arrest warrants limit leaders’ international travel. But don’t expect to see Mr Putin in the dock.
So what is the point of the court battles? Lawyers offer three answers: to impose a reputational and perhaps economic cost on those who spill blood wantonly; to strengthen the negotiating hand of their victims in future diplomatic talks; and, at a minimum, to establish a credible historical record of atrocities. Confronted with an “epidemic of inhumanity”, Mr Khan has argued, the world must “cling to the law” more tightly. The unspoken danger is that, should he and others fail to curb the horrors, the law will collapse and there will be little left to hold onto.
They wouldn't need hundreds of hours of voice recordings to replicate somebody's voice in the 24th century. We don't even really need that today.
2024 local election results:
Labour: 1,158 councillors elected and control of 51 councils
Lib Dems: 522 councillors and 12 councils
Conservatives: 515 councillors and 6 councils
Greens: 181 councillors and 0 councils
Reform: 2 councillors and 0 councils
The way council elections work is that they're staggered over a four-year cycle. The places that voted this year were only in parts of England, hence no SNP or PC numbers. By my count, the total split of councils controlled by each party is now roughly:
Labour 116 (almost back to 2015 levels - Corbyn's leadership did a real number on Labour...)
Conservatives 58 (down from a recent peak of 197 in 2017)
Lib Dems 39 (up from 6 in 2015 and the now highest number they've controlled since the late 90s)
Greens 1
Reform 0
The rest are mostly No Overall Control (no party has a majority) or a few run by independents.
Somehow, from this, far-right Tories like Braverman have reached the bizarre conclusion that Reform are the electoral threat they need to worry most about...
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@kbin.social