An international comparison of 'youth' (15–24) and 'adult' (25–34) homicide 1974–94: Highlighting the US anomaly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Youth murder in the USA has given further impetus to the 'gun debate' in American culture. It is argued that if the extent of violent deaths in the USA, compared with the rest of the developed world, was more widely understood, this would improve the likelihood of change. A USA/international comparison of 'youth & adult' (15-34) homicide was undertaken to demonstrate the anomaly of the US homicide situation compared with other major Western countries. All data are extrapolated from the latest WHO mortality rates. Ratios of ratios are calculated from annual US rates since 1974 to demonstrate the changing pattern of 'youth' (15-24) and 'adult' (25-34) homicide with the General Population Rate (GPR) (1974-94). The five-year average homicide rates are analysed in the 10 major countries, by gender and age, to illustrate the different patterns of homicide. The latest numbers of US homicides over 7.75 years, a matching period being the Vietnam War, are compared against the daily average US fatalities during the conflict. Homicide is relatively a rare statistical event, and as slight changes in countries with small populations can disproportionately distort the ratios, such countries are excluded from the analysis. For completeness, all the latest Western homicide rates are given in the appendix. Only countries with populations of 16 million or more were reviewed, these were: Australia, Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands and Spain (1990-95). The main outcome measures were age-related homicide rates per million of population for the international comparison averaged over the latest five years (1990-95), and actual numbers of deaths for the comparison with the Vietnam War casualty rate. Within the context of a decline in US murder GPR, 'youth' homicide has never been higher: up 48% in the last decade. US male and female 'youth and adult' homicide rates were more than five and three times respectively the rate of the next highest country. A substantial number were linked to firearms. Over the past 7.75 years, an average of 37.5 young men and women (15-34) were murdered daily in the USA, approximately 26.7 by firearms, compared with the average of 21.4 US deaths a day during the Vietnam conflict. The chronic toll of possibly preventable deaths represents a serious public health problem.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".