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misleading. i'm guessing the number of murder victims is many orders of magnitude smaller than marriages, and is negligible.


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The damages from murder aren’t calculated relative against population count.

The 0.001% is a few magnitudes off. In 2018, there were ~15,500 murders in the US with spouses and family members in general being ~15% of those victims.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Hom...


> I'm basing this on the assumption that the average number of homicide incidents per murderer is somewhere around one

From that article: "Unfortunately, the number of murders is relatively small compared to the universe of violent crime, which makes it statistically challenging to analyze."

I don't find that especially unfortunate.


A quick Wikipedia says 352 murders in 2015. So waaayyy less than 500.

But without knowing how many murders and the relevant population sizes I'm not sure that your point is made.

>Compared to the annual murder rate of 20,000 per year that seems negligible.

Why would that be an appropriate base rate, as opposed to, say, the number of farmers of any given origin murdered in any given nation (pick whatever you want for each)?


2155 homicides of which the vast majority are likely by non-strangers, so they would not appear in the statistic the article is proposing.

Well that's certainly playing with statistics.

Most people are murdered by someone they know, so we're looking at a pretty small slice of all murders.

And that stat is for homicides, not murder. So it includes people lawfully killed.


Approximately 22,000 homicides, so not sure how those numbers help whatever you're trying to argue.

This doesn't agree with the FBI stats, and I'd prefer if you don't contaminate my arguments with 2nd Amendment nonsense. According to the FBI, gang kills are also a tiny cause of homicides. Killings of people by their own spouses are more common.

Wait - your numbers come out to something far less than 28X. 28x the homicides divided by 5x the people = 5.6x the rate?

You left out the rape stats. Last I checked, someone was murdered approx every 25 mins, and someone was raped approx every 15 mins.

When you slice it even finer you find that 99.95% of people were murdered zero times, while 0.05% of people suffered 100% of the murders.

They try to make it sound like a statistic about geographical crime distribution, but it's mostly a statistic about sizes of counties.


It made several claims about incarcerations, but the only claim about homicide I saw was "Homicide is a very small percentage of all crimes."

Doesn't that stat just mean that >99.9% of population has not been murdered. It says nothing to the number of people doing the murdering. It could be a single individual on a massive serial spree, or an individual murder per killing which I find just as unlikely. The point is, your stat isn't stating what you think it is

Here we go again with trying to make the number seem bigger.

It's 3 murders per 100,000 people. No, that isn't a lot to me. I'm completely fine and feel safe knowing I have a 0.000036 percent chance of being murdered next year.


That may be true, but if it is, why don't people quoting this statistic talk about the overall homicide rate?

A reasonable question, but barely relevant to the emotional reaction to this specific tragedy, which involved a single victim and presumably a single killer and is unlikely to have much effect on the overall percentages.
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