[JohnKSa]

That, in turn, means the rest of the country has 22,593,340 people, out of which 9929 people get murdered a year, which gives a murder rate (outside those 7 cities) of 43.94, which would put the "rest of Venezuela", between the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Now, you can argue that's still very high, and it is, but there's a big difference between 57 and 44.

That is off-the-charts high considering that it is a statistic that omits the large population centers of the country.

In other words, even AFTER removing all the highest murder centers of the country, it is still #5 #4 in the world for murder rate when comparing against the statistics of countries which still have their high-rate murder centers included.

The bottom line is that to do a realistic/accurate comparison, the comparison needs to be of similar statistics.

At first, you started by trying to compare the murder rate in the single city in the U.S. with the highest murder rate against the murder rate of the entire country of Venezuela. That is not a reasonable comparison for the reasons pointed out above.

Then you tried to compare the murder rate of the part of the country of Venezuela that does NOT include the high murder rate urban areas against the murder rate of entire countries where their high murder rate urban areas are included in the statistic. That is also not a reasonable comparison.

The bottom line is that any reasonable comparison of similar statistics will show that Venezuela has one of the top 2 or 3 murder rates in the world and that nearly half of the top 9 murder capitals of the world are cities in Venezuela.

I'm sure that there are many other creative ways to come up with comparisons which make the violent crime levels in Venezuela seem less shocking than they actually are, but so far all of the ones you have come up with require comparing a statistic of one type for Venezuela with a statistic of a different type for the other countries in the comparison. Not because those comparisons make a lot of sense from a logical standpoint but apparently because simple comparisons of like statistics with like statistics doesn't support your argument.

I can actually guarantee you, without a shadow of a doubt, that if you flash a $100 bill in public, almost anywhere in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, you will get mugged, and probably killed in the process. Yet Buenos Aires is not in the "Top 50", and Argentina is #83 and has a 6.53 murder rate.

That sounds like a dangerous place.

And yet you're arguing that Venezuela, where even the parts of the country that aren't on the top 50 list of the most dangerous cities in the world have a murder rate around 5 times higher than Buenos Aires is not a dangerous place? I don't follow that logic.

Took me a couple of days to realize maybe the US wasn't as they said.

You should have looked at the statistics and you would have seen that the violent crime rate is actually quite low overall--below that of even Argentina which has one of the lowest violent crime rates in Latin America.

The statistic would have shown that even though the U.S. makes up about 4% of the world, only 8% of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in the U.S. Compared, for example to Venezuela which makes up 0.4% of the world and yet has 14% of the 50 most violent cities in the world. Or compared to Brazil which makes up only about 3% of the world population but has 38% of the world's 50 most violent cities.

So, you shouldn't judge a country for a number, or an opinion. Sometimes, the only way to know something is, well... knowing it.

"Knowing something" without facts to back it up is not actually knowing something. It is merely holding an opinion. It is only when opinion is backed by facts, that it can graduate from being simply an opinion to being knowledge.