I have to agree with you, for a change. I heard that the law enforcement folk refer to these cases as NHI - no humans involved.
I live in a murder capital of the US, where there is one murder a day on average. A lot of people got shot within a five or six blocks of where I live or used to live. Yet I see my chances of being shot as rather slim, because I do not engage in any of the above listed activities. The risk is still there - being caught in a cross fire, mistaken identity, botched robbery - but is not nearly as high as that for people who are directly involved and the aforementioned activities.
BTW, gun violence attracts a lot of media attention in Baltimore. Not long ago I heard it on the radio that some doctors and medical staff actually recognize some of the folk they treat for GSW, because they are they loyal customers so to speak.
>
> But:
>
> > Which is what I imagine the merikans Woj was
> > talking about are afraid of, yes?
>
> I think there's a danger is using murder statistics to say _anything_
> about the 'violent crime' rate in the US: first of all, for all the
> seeming ambiguity above (40% "unknown"), murder is the MOST LIKELY to be
> cleared violent crime. A LOT of violent crime is, essentially, random
> in the way that we've shown murder not to be. Not murder: but
> non-murder violent crime.
The fact that US crime rates do not differ much from those elsewhere, except murders is water under the bridge. So is the fact that people who live and regularly interact together have a greater chance of harming each other than those who do not.
One way of setting up this problem is the way airplane accidents are measured - in relation to the intensity of use (e.g. passengers carried or miles traveled) rather than the number of aircraft. Likewise, the right way of addressing the probability of being a victim of violent crime is to measure it against the total hours of interaction with the perpetrator in a fixed time frame. If we used that measure, victimization by strangers would tower over victimization by family members/acquaintances.
The point here is that we can use the same numbers to make two very different and mutually contradicting points.
Another point - I was referring to crime perceptions not actual crime victimization, which as I just pointed out is not that much different in this country than elsewhere. But if you asked and average US-ser, he would be scared shitless of crime and violence. So the right question to ask is why is that an average frog-eater is not afraid of crime whereas an average yank is scared shitless of it, even though both face about the same probability of being victimized.
I think there are two factors: fear mongering to sell policies, intellectual commodity and products (cf. Barry Glassner _The culture of fear_) and alienation (people who are not connected to others are more fearful). Both are the products of the dysfunctional US society and institutions.
Wojtek