Violent crime is a part of life. That’s true pretty much everywhere. Yet it seems that our violent crime rates are higher than most other developed nations. Many blame guns for that.

However, we’ve pointed out before that’s not accurate.

In that post, we looked at non-gun crime rates and compared them to total crime rates in other places and found that we are, in fact, just a more violent nation.

Yet that was just one look. The Mirror in the UK took issue with American politicians saying their country had worse knife-crime rates than we had gun crime earlier this year. They sought to debunk that entirely.

And, well, they did…but they also kind of proved a pro-gun point.

Gun violence in the US of course dwarfs the UK’s.

But even on knife crime alone, the US suffers far more.

Latest figures show 4.96 homicides “due to knives or cutting instruments” in America for every million of the population in 2016. In Britain the figure was 3.26.

Now, The Mirror sought to try and make sure they appeared anti-gun later in the piece, but this is a very important point that mirrors the post I wrote earlier this year.

Americans are just more violent, as a people, than elsewhere in the developed world.

Until we sit down and try to figure out why, no amount of legislation will do much of anything. We’ll never be the UK or France or anywhere else in Europe.

And let’s also remember that this is just a look at “knife crime,” not those carried out with literally any other instrument. We’re likely higher on all of those as well. After all, the UK’s total homicide rate in 2020 was 1.17 while just our knife homicide rate was 1.6. It only stands to reason that “hammer crime” and homicides with bare hands and feet are also higher.

We are a more violent nation.

Yet what do we hear from the American left? We hear all about how we need gun control, and if we do that we can solve our violent crime issue. They want you to believe that murders will just drop to UK levels if we did that.

Yet look at the above-listed homicide rates. Just one implement–and not the gun–is used more often for murder than everything in the UK. Just one thing.

And you’re a fool if you think none of what is currently listed as gun homicides wouldn’t have happened with another weapon.

Why is it that no one on the left is interested in actually solving the violence part of “gun violence?” Why are they so enamored with going after the gun, even though we can show definitively that guns aren’t the problem, that it’s a people issue?

The answer is that solving the people problem isn’t sexy. It involves a lot of things that happen under the surface and may not show up in the statistics before the next election cycle. So, they focus on something they know deep down they can’t actually do, then they can blame the other side for the problem.

And, to be fair, I think at least some of these folks really believe gun control works. They’re just too myopic to see the harsh reality, that our issues are cultural, but that the culture responsible isn’t the gun culture.

Then again, when have facts mattered to those looking for scapegoats?