Balrog said:
While the violent crime rate is higher in the UK, the death rate from violent crime is higher in the US.
Would you rather be punched in the face, or shot in the face?
In the USA a significant portion of our homicide victims, and the perpetrators, are in the glorified gang/drug subculture. This is generally by choice, and so people have the choice to be subject to that much more dangerous lifestyle.
Even many of the 'innocent' victims are the girlfriends (choosing to date them) and siblings of those that are in that culture by choice.
If you remove these murders from the statistics the USA murder rate drops massively. Gang members killing gang members is a lot of the murders.
By contrast in the UK it is not members of a specific subculture that are the primary victims. It is anyone that a group of teens chooses to victimize at random.
They had a fad in the UK for years called the 'happy slap'. They would randomly slap, punch, or beat someone at random walking by and record it. Then laugh about how the oblivious victim just walking by got violently punched in the face or something similar..
I don't think such a fad would survive in the US, people would end up dead and the fad would die off before it got popular.
But in the UK it survived many years.
Most of the UK's violence targets the average person. Most of the USA's violence targets those that choose to be part of the gang and drug culture.
This means it is easier to avoid being shot or otherwise victimized as an adult in the USA than it is to avoid being victimized in the UK.