I saw this meme which didn't pass the sniff test:
Jess Piper @piper4missouri: "It's the fucking guns."
Owen Benjamin @OwenBenjamin: "If you took away all blacks and Mexicans, america has a lower per capital murder rate than Denmark or Norway. We don't have a gun problem ..."
So I decided to look into it:
According to Macrotrends, in 2021 the US murder rate was 6.81 per 100,000 population (the CDC says it was 7.8 but let's use one data source for simplicity and data comparability [the data ultimately comes from the World Bank but the web UI rounds to the nearest whole number, which is imprecise]; note that this is being generous to the original claim).
Meanwhile, in Denmark it was 0.80 and in Norway it was 0.54.
The FBI's 2019 Crime in the United States (the 2021 version does not report Latino offender numbers) Expanded Homicide Data Table 6 reports murders by race and ethnicity of offender. Unfortunately, while whether the offender is Black or African American is reported, whether he is Mexican is not. So I will use "Hispanic or Latino" as a proxy for "Mexican" (which is again arguably generous to the original claim, depending on whether you think Mexicans are more or less murderous than the average Latino).
In 2019, out of 6,391 murders where the race of the offender was known, 3,218 offenders (50.4%) were black.
In 2019, out of 4,448 murders where the ethnicity of the offender was known, 874 (19.6%) were Hispanic or Latino.
For simplicity, let us assume that there're no black Hispanic or Latino people, and that the proportion of murderers in the population matches that in the subset for which race and ethnicity is known.
Therefore, with this simplified calculation, 70% of murders in the US in 2019 were committed by Blacks and "Mexicans".
To get a non-Black and non-"Mexican" murder rate, we need to transform the original homicide number and correct it for population.
According to the CDC, in 2021 there were 26,031 homicides in the US. Removing Black and "Mexican" murderers, we get 7,809 homicides. According to the US Census Bureau, 13.6% of the population is Black or African American alone and 19.1% is Hispanic or Latino (only 3.0% are of two or more races), and the midpoint of the April 1, 2020 and July 1, 2022 population estimates is 332,368,179.5.
Removing the Black and "Mexican" populations, we get a population of 223,683,785.
So the non-Black and non-"Mexican" murder rate is 7,809 / 223,683,785, which works out to 3.49 per 100,000 population.
Note that this is much higher than Denmark and Norway. Macrotrends does not seem to list countries by homicide rate, but according to Wikipedia's list (which makes the UNODC data sortable), that would put the US at about the 93rd highest homicide rate in the world, tied with the Cook Islands.
The only European OECD member with a higher homicide rate than the non-Black, non-"Mexican" US is Latvia (3.6, 90th).
Note that the "Mexican" proportion of known offenders is only slightly higher than their share of the population, so restricting the analysis to the non-Black population is not going to change the results much.
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