Costa Rica's homicide rate is 17 per 100,000 people. You probably won't notice it living in whatever expatriate enclave you and your wife are looking at, but that's a crushing burden on the average person in the country.
You’re conflating two different things. The number of guns in absolute terms doesn’t matter as much as availability to people who are inclined to commit crimes: a collector / prepper going from 10 to 11 guns affects the total count but doesn’t impact the crime stats the way an angry teenager going from 0 to 1 gun does.
This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
> Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.
Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
>This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
Yes, density would have been a better choice - what I was trying to get at is that when you have a lot of people in close proximity you have more social interactions which can turn negative. For example, here in DC violent crime is largely limited to a few areas where drunk people get out of bars late at night and various crews are fighting over territory, so the numbers go up but most people in the neighborhood aren't affected. The crime rate always goes up in the summer because people are out on the street where they can get into arguments, and everyone's a bit touchy during a heat wave.
You certainly have things like rural gangs, too, but if things are spread out you just don't have that critical mass to ramp the numbers up. This also plays out in other types of crimes – cars get stolen anywhere there are cars, but thieves are playing the odds and it's easier not to attract in a dense population while they'd stick out if they started going up some stranger's driveway in a place where there's no other traffic. When that Kia lock exploit was in the news, there were bored teenagers basically treating street parking as a shopping mall because the supply was huge and until they actually touched a car there was no crime in walking down a sidewalk.
Household ownership doesn't matter if the people who own them aren't likely to be involved in crimes - if a 50 year old farmer has a hunting rifle, their risk profile to society is really different than an angry 19 year old with a handgun.
While crime rates are per 100,000 people, population density makes a big difference because a low density, homogeneous population is going to have fewer interactions which turn negative. That's why people comparing crime stats usually compare cities or regions to avoid falsely reporting a correlation which is nothing more than a function of urban vs. rural density.
And considering that the US has the highest murder rate among first world countries, highest incarceration rate and spends the most on the military. Obvious the US is doing something wrong.
Costa Rica is also turning into the new haven for the drug cartels to run ops, after they were evicted from El Salvador, and the lack of a military certainly does not help here.
Let's not look at overmilitarized countries like the US. And yes, for most countries in Latin America such as Mexico and Colombia, direct conflict with cartels is handled by the military, while internally handled by the police and justice branches.
The city I spent all of my childhood and went to college in had a murder rate in the 20s per 100,000 the year I graduated. It wasn’t a large city.
Retirement is a long way away. But next year, we have an Airbnb in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose that is safe. It’s a high rise condo 2/2 with a gym and a pool.
The murder rate in “Atlanta” is also still around 20 per 100,000 and I lived in various suburbs of metro Atlanta until 2022 and was never in fear of my life going into the city. But I also lived in a suburban enclaves there.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be one of these ignorant entitled Americans who refuse to learn Spanish. I am close to A2 level Spanish now and should be there by the time we go next year. I can hold simple conversations.
