In an excellent article about the UK’s failed experiment in gun control, Janet Malcolm offer an amazing example of the perils of using statistics as-is from different countries. As we all know, the United States has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The U.S. homicide rate, for example, is almost three time as high as that of Great Britain. Sort of. . . Well, maybe not …
The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isnÂ’t subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police “massage down” the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.
The same oddity occurs with infant mortality. You’d think that establishing when a person is born and when they die would be fairly straightforward, but in fact the United States records infant mortality statistics in a way that is out of step with the rest of the world and which artificially inflates the U.S. infant mortality rate (the short version is that in the U.S. many premature infants who die shortly after birth are counted in birth and death statistics, whereas in most of the world they are not considered live births).
Or take Reporters Without Borders report which ranks freedom of speech and puts Canada at 5th in the world while the U.S. comes in at 17. The U.S. comes in so low because of the relatively large number (for a Western nation) of reporters who are jailed, almost always because they refuse to reveal a source.
But this is largely an artifact of the United States’ peculiar prior restraint doctrine. In the United States it is almost impossible to for the government to prevent publication of anything in a newspaper. The government can go in later and subpoena a reporter or a person can sue for libel, but the odds of getting a court to enjoin publication is very close to zero except for a few extreme national security issues.
In many Western countries, there is no such limit and there are strict laws that prevent newspapers and broadcast outlets from reporting on certain topics. For example, most of the cases where reporters are jailed for not revealing sources are criminal cases. Most other Western countries, including Canada, place much stricter limits on what can be reported in coverage of criminal cases and don’t run into these sorts of problems.
Source:
Gun ControlÂ’s Twisted Outcome
Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S. Joyce Lee Malcolm, Reason, November 2002.
Reporters Without Borders is publishing the first worldwide press freedom index. Reporters Without Borders, October 2002.