I admit that this surprised me too. No matter how much one distrusts media narratives, they shape our perceptions until something breaks the bubble and makes you question the basic assumptions that inform your worldview.
What choice do we have? We can't go down every rabbit hole to ferret out the truth. We have to pick and choose our battles, after all.
So it's good to have a reminder to remain skeptical in all things, especially when some interest or political agenda is involved.
A case in point: the story we are told about crime rates in the United States being especially high compared to our peers turns out to be wrong.
John R. Lott Jr. reports for RealClearInvestigations that, contrary to conventional wisdom that the U.S. is the world's most violent developed nation, victimization survey data show that Australia and Canada – both praised for strict gun laws – actually have significantly higher…
— J. Peder Zane (@JPederZane) July 9, 2026
John R. Lott Jr. reports for RealClearInvestigations that, contrary to conventional wisdom that the U.S. is the world's most violent developed nation, victimization survey data show that Australia and Canada – both praised for strict gun laws – actually have significantly higher rates of violent crime than the United States, despite the U.S. maintaining a higher murder rate.
It's true that America has a murder rate higher than our peers, but the picture changes dramatically when you look at violent crime rates overall.
Even in murder stats, the overall picture is quite different than you would suppose.
Regarding homicide, the most heinous crime of all, it’s true that in 2025, the U.S. murder rate was about four per 100,000 people – roughly twice Australia’s and Canada’s 2024 homicide rate. Yet it’s also true that homicides account for only a tiny fraction of violent crime. In 2024, homicides represented just 0.21% of violent crimes in the U.S., based on National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Murder comprises an even smaller fraction of crimes in Australia and Canada.
And those murders are, for the most part, gang-related and concentrated heavily in tiny percentages of cities measured in blocks, where gangs fight over disputed territory.
Murders in the U.S. are usually highly concentrated geographically, often connected to street gang activity, and threaten only a tiny fraction of Americans. Just 2% of counties account for approximately 54% of all murders, and within those counties roughly two-thirds of killings occur within areas covering only about ten city blocks. By contrast, 53% of U.S. counties report no murders in a typical year, while another 16% report only one.
There's no doubt that it would be great to lower that murder rate as much as possible, but the problem exists mainly because the criminal justice system refuses to jail felons who have long rap sheets. That's why most murders you hear about are committed by people with dozens of felony arrests.
It's time to impeach some judges and boot lax prosecutors to solve that problem. There's not much you can do to reduce the rate of murders by people who snap.
But what about the other 99.8% of violent crimes? How does the US compare to Canada and Australia? Canada, at least, you would expect to be a near-utopia of politeness.
It turns out that Australia, for instance, has vastly higher rates of assaults, robbery, rape, and break-ins than the United States.
Because police statistics capture only a fraction of actual crime, the U.S., Canada, and Australia all conduct large-scale victimization surveys that estimate total crime, including incidents never reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which interviews roughly 240,000 Americans annually, for more than 50 years. Australia relies on a comparable survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while Statistics Canada conducts the General Social Survey (GSS) on Safety and Victimization.
“Anyone who wants to understand the seriousness of crime in Canada needs to recognize that victimization surveys paint a more complete picture than police-reported crime,” said Gary Mauser, who has extensively studied crime at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
The gap between police statistics and actual victimization is substantial. In Canada, the police-reported violent-crime rate is 885 per 100,000 people. The GSS reported a violent victimization rate almost 10 times that – 8,300 per 100,000.
Australia shows a similar pattern. Although the state of Victoria did not provide assault data to the ABS, only about 37% of robberies and sexual assaults were reported to police in 2024.
The U.S. data tell a very different story. Although the FBI does not collect national counts of simple assault, it recorded 1,203,808 violent crimes in 2019. During the same year, the NCVS estimated 2,013,220 felonious violent crimes – rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault, excluding simple assault. Police reports therefore captured 59.8% of the NCVS estimate.
Using these broad estimates, Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates.
But even this Australian data significantly understates the extent of violent crime because it counts victims rather than the number of crimes, unlike the U.S. data. If someone is robbed or sexually assaulted twice, the Australian survey records only one victimization, while the U.S. counts two separate crimes. As a result, Australia’s survey misses repeat victimizations and understates the total amount of violent crime. Even modest adjustments suggest that Australia’s violent crime rate is 15% higher than already discussed.
Perhaps the vast difference between the impressions Europeans had before they came to the United States that we live in a crime-ridden hellhole and the experiences they had once they came here.
None of this is a reason to downplay violent crimes in the United States. We clearly have a problem, but it is not the problem many want you to think because they are highly focused on seizing guns from law-abiding citizens, when the statistics show that an armed society like the United States is actually safer than one where citizens are disarmed.
Our violent crime problem is out of control in two areas, one of which can easily be fixed, and another that can be dealt with far better with concentrated policing: 1) repeat offenders should be tossed in jail, not tossed out onto the streets until they get caught killing somebody; and, 2) we should drop the "racial profiling" concerns that make going after gangs harder than it should be.
That wouldn't eliminate gang violence, but it would reduce it. Throw in "broken windows" policing, and you won't "solve" the insolvable (some people will always commit crimes because it is human nature), but it would reduce crime rates and increase overall safety.
Constitutional carry laws could serve as a deterrent to criminals who view robbery as an easy crime. Florida saw crime rates fall dramatically as more people carried guns, since few people are willing to risk their lives for $50.
There is no "solution" to crime, although we do know that high-trust societies tend to have much lower crime rates than low-trust ones. Until they opened their borders to migrants, the Nordic countries were famously safe because they were largely homogeneous. As "diversity" increased, crime went up. Most crime in the United States exists in concentrated "low-trust" regions, while suburbs and exurbs tend to be very safe.
The lesson regarding the misperceptions we have about crime is simple and, once you realize it exists, unsurprising. We are being sold a narrative. It's easy to lie when you cherry-pick, and people will lie when they have an incentive to do so. Such as being activists for a cause, such as gun control.
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