I saw this tweet shared in the form of a picture:
"The US has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world ,
If you remove
Chicago
Washington DC
Detroit
St Louis
Philadelphia
The US is then 189th out of 193 countries in the world . All 5 cities have the strictest gun control laws and all controlled by democrats .
FACT CHECK IT ."
Immediately, I knew that these numbers were off, so I decided to see just how off they were (apparently it's a modified version of a 2012 meme: "The United States ranks 3rd in Murders throughout the World. But if you take out Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and New Orleans, the United States is 4th from the Bottom for Murders. These 4 Cities also have the toughest Gun Control Laws in the United States. All 4 are also controlled by Democrats").
The US is only 59th in the international murder rate rankings, with 20,982 murders in 2020 and 6.3 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
Chicago had 770 homicides in 2020 and has a population of 2.7 million.
Detroit had 327 homicides in 2020 and has a population of 672,000.
Washington DC had 198 homicides in 2020 and has a population of 702,000.
St Louis had 262 homicides in 2020 and has a population of 305,000
Philadelphia had 499 homicides in 2020 and has a population of 1.6 million
So excluding these 5 cities, we get 18,926 murders in 2020, over a population of 324 million (i.e. excluding these 5 cities), i.e. a murder rate of 5.8 per 100,000, and the US would drop in the murder rate rankings from 59 to 65.
Furthermore, it is reported that "Missouri gun laws are some of the weakest in the country" and there aren't any reports that St Louis has particularly strict gun control. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is rated a B- in gun control laws by Giffords, so it's not particularly tight, and Philadelphia is not allowed to enact its own gun laws. And Michigan is rated a C+, so it has even looser gun control than Pennsylvania, and there aren't any reports that Detroit has specific strict gun control in addition to state laws.
Ironically, gun nuts like to claim that gun control in the US will be useless because weapons will just be smuggled in from Mexico (when the flow of weapons is actually in the other direction), while insisting that the fact that cities with gun control still see high gun crime means that gun control doesn't work.
Presumably this is because weapons can be smuggled across the Mexican border into the US, but weapons cannot cross US state or city boundaries (and no, this doesn't mean gun control never works due to smuggling, since we don't see that in other countries - but of course we know that what works in countries of up to 126 million will somehow never work in a country of 330 million, because something magical happens in between 126 million and 330 million which ensures that the US will always be special).
Keywords: Memphis, Baltimore, Democratic Cities, Top 10, top ten, remove cities
