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Brazil sets new record for homicides

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Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#101

Post by joe_the_user »

lostlogin wrote: post #72
joe_the_user wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of deaths in the war in Syria have also been combatants with only being minority civilians, a substantial minority certainly but I suspect there's a reasonable minority of "civilians" killed in Brazilian drug wars. This 63K killed/year figure seems to exceed some years of the Syrian civil war. Brazil is a larger country but the drug war is concentrated in a minority of the country. The one thing you're n…

Thanks for that. I was sceptical and went for a dig. In most conflicts the civilian to combatant death ratio is high, with numbers like 9:1 cited. This is probably over estimated but having a civilian toll lower than combatant is unusual. As far as I can tell Syria has a toll of about 3.5 combatants to each civilian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio

Indeed, as your link essentially states, civilian to combatant casualty rates are complex. As your link notes, high ratios like 9:1 have only been documented in a few campaigns.

After WWI, "total warfare" targeting the entire population and productive capacity of the enemy in a mechanized fashion seemed like the logical direction in which war would go. The reality has been somewhat different, with guerrilla warfare and other asymmetrical approaches making political dimensions important also, where on the one hand avoiding unneeded deaths is often a useful political strategy and on the other hand, if the enemy is essentially hardened guerrillas with rocket launchers hiding in caves and supported from outside, that enemy may not be sensitive to the mass destruction of the population and productive capacity of the area. Both these situation make "total war" a less effective strategy (witness the different casualty ratios of the first and second Chechen wars).

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

joe_the_user wrote: post #101
lostlogin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that. I was sceptical and went for a dig. In most conflicts the civilian to combatant death ratio is high, with numbers like 9:1 cited. This is probably over estimated but having a civilian toll lower than combatant is unusual. As far as I can tell Syria has a toll of about 3.5 combatants to each civilian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio

Indeed, as your link essentially states, civilian to combatant casualty rates are complex. As your link notes, high ratios like 9:1 have only been documented in a few campaigns. After WWI, "total warfare" targeting the entire population and productive capacity of the enemy in a mechanized fashion seemed like the logical direction in which war would go. The reality has been somewhat different, with guerrilla warfare a…

> After WWI, "total warfare" targeting the entire population and productive capacity of the enemy in a mechanized fashion seemed like the logical direction in which war would go. The reality has been somewhat different

Not all that different, in the subsequent direct conflicts with full investment by same-tier powers on both sides. But you don't have many of those with major powers since then, WWII being the main one.

> making political dimensions important also,

The political dimension is always paramount even in total war; breaking the will to fight of the enemy population is the point of total war.

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#103

Post by jrace »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #62
simonh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>S population has increased by 10s of millions since then, but murders continue to drop. Yet mass shootings are becoming dramatically more common. What I find curious is that while the Brazilian murder rate is about 6 or 7 times that in the US, the rate of firearm related deaths is 'only' double. Is firearm suicide dramatically more common in the US, or are a lot of the murders perpetrated in Brazil not firearm relat…

70-80% of all firearm deaths in the US are suicide related.

Closer to 66%,

https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/ Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides.5 The U.S. gun suicide rate is eight times that of other high-income countries.6 Access to a gun increases the risk of death by suicide by three times.7 Gun suicides are concentrated in states with high rates of gun ownership.8 Most people who attempt suicide do not die—unless they use a gun. Across all suicide attempts not involving a firearm, less than five percent will result in death.9 But for gun suicides, those statistics are flipped: approximately 85 percent of gun suicide attempts end in death

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#104

Post by sctb »

megaman22 wrote: post #35

Latin American countries are a shitshow. Cynically I cannot but wonder what might be if they got their shit 6ogeth4t

We don't have any need here for a comment like this. Please say something meaningful instead, or nothing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#105

Post by ransom1538 »

gldalmaso wrote: post #90
ransom1538 wrote: post #52

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Brazil "Thus, disarmament is effectively happening in Brazil,[12] as are massive gun confiscations,[13] notwithstanding its refusal by Brazilian people (at the referendum of 2005). Some argue that this will increase gun homicides. Other research shows that there is a decrease in firearm deaths correlating with disarmament.[14][15] However, 2012 marked the highest rate of gun…

Most guns used in crime in Brazil are in the hands of criminals (usually traffic) and militia (which is just different criminals with ties to the police). They wouldn't exactly be purchasing those guns with their ids. A lot of it comes from the police and the army. Gun laws protect civilians against civilians. There are no school shootings here that I'm aware of for instance (exceptions are usually targeted events),…

"There are no school shootings here that I'm aware of " (Referring to brazil).

Here is an entire list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Brazil

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#106

Post by cust0m »

rvr_ wrote: post #18

Brazilian here. Our criminality numbers are _probably_ higher than the official numbers. The country is huge and diverse, but even the most pacific states and cities are in a bad shape if compared to almost any other country. More than 70% of the deaths are related to gang conflicts. Drugs are not the only problem. We also have a lot of cargo/truck stealing, street-level robbery, an enormous black market of stolen mo…

how do you forgot the bank robery?

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#107

Post by jessaustin »

Something that never seems to come up in discussions of violence rates in the Americas is our history of colonial domination. The fraction of people who survived the onslaught of Old-World diseases were not equipped to effectively resist the influx of predatory Europeans. That was and is a very violent process. It's not over.

Re: Brazil sets new record for homicides

#110

Post by hugocbp »

bennicholes wrote: post #49
goshx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never know when you are going to be targeted, so you live in this constant fear. Ask anyone who lives in Brazil what they do if they see two guys in a motorcycle coming their way. I've been robbed at gun point; I've woken up with someone inside my bedroom stealing my laptop; I've been followed home; The bus from the public transport system I used to take was stopped by criminals and set on fire; and so on. It use…

Where did you live in Brazil? As an American I visit the interior of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte often and have never experienced anything like this, nor does it seem my Brazilian friends live in constant anxiety.

I'm from Belo Horizonte now living in Canada... Mostly moved because couldn't take the anxiety of being in fear every single time I had to leave home.

Most people just play the numbers game. I, for example, have been robbed at gunpoint, with a knife, with 4 teenagers threatening to beat me up when I was 14 and I was even "lightning kidnapped" (I don't even know the term in English, but I was put in a car and bandits kept me for 8 hours and drove me around waiting for the banking hours to reset the withdraw money from ATM to take more form my account).

A lot of my friends, though, have never been robbed at all.

In general, we all know we are subject to that, but in the end it is mostly just bad or good luck. Just being in the wrong place in the wrong time.

From all the people I know, those that have never been through this just live life mostly normally. But once you've suffered that at least once, you can never really fully rest again.

The homicides problem on that news is actually not that relevant in that context because, as others have said, it is really concentrated in poor neighborhoods or slums, where the State basically is nonexistent.

For example, in a lot of violent slums, criminals take and sell access to pirated cable TV, energy and water, to the point where the official employees can be made to fix stuff when they go there to try and cut signals. That is how absent the state is in those places.

But when you see homicides numbers like that go up, probably the random crimes to the whole population is going up as well.

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