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1. Write a 300 word response to the following question using information from the article above and your own ideas. What leads to violence and what will be the best way to “Cure” violence?

2. Write a 300 word response to the following question using information from the article above, other articles you may find about crime, the charts we looked at in the criminology video notes, and your own ideas.Why does the United States have such a high crime rate compared to the rest of the world and how is crime treated differently in the United States compared to other highly developed countries?

User Anzurio
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2- The United States has such a high crime rate compared to the rest of the world for many basic reasons. Diversity resulted in racial conflicts. Income disparity resulted in the drive for a lot of crimes, such as robbery. Guns themselves don’t commit crimes, they MAGNIFY the crime problem by making it FAR easier. Failed education resulted in people having less common sense and tending to commit crimes more. The failed judicial system resulted in plenty of dangerous criminals left roaming around the street because of overflowing jails. There’s a massive amount of wealth disparity. Poor people are treated like garbage. The police aren’t there to stop crime, they’re there to treat poor people like garbage. As such, no one trusts them. It’s like not calling the fire department when there’s a fire because their fire hoses are full of gasoline. No one wants to address the root causes of crime like deep poverty, mental illness, and lack of educational opportunities. The list goes on. The US does have an unusually high murder rate when compared to EU countries. Given that murders are largely the end result of other crimes, and the rate for other crimes is not unusually high, there must be some other factor that means that significantly more robberies, assaults, and so on end up as murders, rather than as non-fatal assaults. Another reason is that you are given the right to do so and people who have too many rights or freedoms start to act entitled and that includes higher crime rates. Circling back to the less fortunate, or the "poor".

America and many Americans are poor because most of the huge amount of money generated every year is concentrated at the very top. Just 1% of the population has more wealth than the entire bottom half. The wealth gap is enormous, perhaps the worst among all first-world countries. One in seven American families lives in official poverty, and tens of thousands are homeless. And Americans don’t have the high quality of life that other first-world countries have. No fast train service, no top-notch public transportation, no affordable universal healthcare, no institutions or asylums for the mentally ill (they are treated as “outpatients”), no free higher education (tuition is extremely expensive), no workplace protections (it’s brutal—you can be fired for any reason at any moment—only 6 months of paltry unemployment insurance before being abandoned, and a pitiful two weeks of vacation a year—if you are lucky). Americans are either rich (maybe 20%) and live off investments, or they work too hard and make do with what little they have. In the end, after putting their kids through university and after paying for medical care, etc, they retire with little or nothing in the bank.