You can’t go online or watch the news without some media outlet comparing the gun homicide rate of the United States to other nations.
We are always the outlier, when compared to the other Western or First World or Wealthy nations we get grouped with.
We’re always told that Switzerland has very low gun crime, despite having very high rates of gun ownership, because all its gun owning citizens served in the military, have been trained, and the Swiss screen people for mental illness.
Then we’re told that Japan has one of the lowest murder rates in the world because they banned guns.
There is one piece to the puzzle that never gets mentioned, that is perhaps more important than any gun ban or training or other legal factor.
Diversity. Diversity is not our strength but our weakness on this issue.
Let me be clear, I am not blaming minorities for the homicide rate. This is not a white supremacist screed.
A clear pattern emerges were the nations with the lowest homicide rate have the most ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
Japan has one of the lowest murder rates in the world and is a xenophobic, mono-culture, ethno-state.
The country is one big family. This cuts down on internal friction, social strife, and other problems that lead to violence.
Prior to WWII, most the wars in Europe were religious in nature. Europe was marked by sectarian tribalism. Following WWII, the non Soviet states saw relatively peaceful times, with religion in Europe on the downtrend, and allegiance to the state being on the uptrend.
There were still “The Troubles” between the English and Irish, two ethnically, culturally, and religiously different groups. Ethnic and religious wars broke out in the former soviet nations in the Balkans, leading to the Balkanization of Eastern Europe.
In recent times, the spike in crime in the Nordic countries, England, France, and other places in Europe is directly tied to the influx of migrants from tribal regions of the world. Their lack of integration causes friction and causes violence.
If you look at the nations of the world with the highest rates of murder, you see the opposite of modern Europe.
The map above shows that the highest rates of murder come from nations that have at least one of two, and usually both conditions: high levels of ethnic/cultural/religious diversity, and failed states.
Africa is a bloodbath of tribal fighting. So is the Middle East and Central Asia. To Americans, Africans may all be black, but in Africa, one’s tribal allegiance is critical. Less we forget the Hutu/Tutsi genocide of the 90’s. Right now, South Africa, like Zimbabwe before it, is throwing off the last remnants of colonialism by killing and oppressing its last remaining white people.
In the Middle East the conflicts are tribal, ethnic, and religious. Being the wrong kind of Muslim can get you killed. Being a non Muslim can get you sold into sex slavery. Even if you are Muslim, the difference between Arab, Persian, Urdu, and Afghan is worth murdering over.
In South America, the violence is less ethnic and more tribal. The tribes are gangs, fighting for control of land, drug sales to the US, and occasionally politics. When a nation fails, local gang leaders fill in the power vacuum.
A perfect example of this is the power of MS-13 in El Salvador.
This happens in the US too. Wherever we see a lack of police and government support in poor areas, we see a rise in street gangs. This is the tribal violence in America. Gang crime is overwhelmingly the cause of high murder rates in large US cites. Remember the famous Bloods vs. Crips gang violence during the height of the Crack Epidemic in the late 80’s early 90’s. That was a tribal war, no different than the Hutus vs. Tutsis, but in Los Angeles county.
There is also an ethnic aspect to this, the black gangs hate the Mexican gangs who hate MS-13, and they all fight.
I say this to point out that America will NEVER have the homicide rate of Switzerland or Japan. It’s not because we have a gun culture, or have too many guns, or don’t have enough training. We have so many different cultures and groups of people living together with little but a flag to unite us.
What we should note is that compared to other places in the world with high levels of ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, we are a peaceful and successful as we are. We have more in common with Afghanistan than Switzerland when it comes to tribal diversity, but we are not a failed state. There is no other nation on earth with our level of diversity that is as stable and wealthy as we are.
If there is a cultural aspect of America that needs changing, it is not our gun culture but our balkanized culture. We need more national unity around the things we have in common to reduce the tribal breakup of our society and violence that comes from it.
But you will never see any pundit mention any of this on TV.
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