If you really need to protect yourself get a tazer, even then I wouldn't reccomend carrying any weapon.

America really does confuse me sometimes...

What is causing the high murder rates in the USA? Whether it be gun ownership, or something else, something is fucking wrong with these crime rates.

Nobody has guns in Australia so I don't need a gun to protect me from people who have guns.

It's not gun ownership. I assure you. America has some deeper-rooted problems that cause the crime. Through a few charts, I hope that you can understand some of the underlying correlations between American crime & it's causes

Crime in the US was lower in the 50's, followed by an incredible increase in the 60s and 70s, plateauing in the 80's, and dropping in the 90's. If you think we're bad now what about then?

As you can see, crime saw rapid increases in the 60s and 70's. Not very good for America. Why was this the case? There are a lot of possibilities:

• Racial integration causing strife
• Baby boom in 50's causing influx of population that caused issues with law enforcement or other things (values, ect)
• Influx of drug usage/distribution in the 60's
• Degredation in education correlating with some crime increases.

A few more charts to show crime rates by race:

Another one showing overall crime rates in the 80's among blacks/whites:

Unemployment - Does it correlate with crime increases/decreases? I think there's a correlation here, given the peaks here that correlate with the above chart:

How do these charts correlate with education among races in the US? Again, I think there's a correlation:

As you can see, whites increased by 50% while blacks nearly doubled. Another chart concerning dropout rates:

Finally, some other ideas concerning crime correlations:

At any rate, lots of different ways to look at it. I think that a lot of it comes down to shifts in urbanization via the population boom, bad education (which began in the 60's), among other things.

geez thats a lot of graphs.