Does the US have a stabbing problem?

I was inspired to do a little digging and write some of my thoughts on this topic by a strange mix of sources. One was a post on Facebook I saw from an American acquaintance who responded to the fatal shooting of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe with 'Just remember gun laws don't stop criminals' (for context, he is stationed in Japan). Another was a video of a YouTube reactor who, whilst reacting to some uk drill/rap which mentioned the frequent stabbings in London, used this to bolster his view that gun control was futile as people would just resort to knives, and saw the problems occurring in the UK and more specifically London, as an example of this. The third instance is from Andrew Tate, the strange masculinity influencer/kickboxer/sexual assault promoter and advocate. As one of his many videos that the algorithm has been spamming people's timelines with Tate has stated that London is a failed society, (a term reserved mainly for rich liberal countries it turns out) because of the frequency of stabbings, and that he would prevent stabbings by hanging people from the Tower of London for the offence. 

All of these got me thinking about London and the UK's stabbing problem. For starters, I'm a big fan of UK hip-hop, grime, rap and to a lesser extent drill. I'm also a young man, so of course I'm not naïve to the use of blades and knives as a threat/deterrent for almost exclusively young men in almost exclusively poor urban areas. To listen to uk rap/drill is to be inundated into a world where carrying knives and stabbing other human beings are mentioned as nonchalantly as purchasing the latest fashion: Here are some lines just from some songs that I have listened to in the last week: 

'my young g's don't count a stabbin if it happened in his limbs'

'name 3 opps, 3 opps that you've chinged, I won't rap'

'free little v dots was on a stabbing career'

'The guns bringing feds, it's a mess on the roads so I keep a rambo like sylvester stallone'

UK drill pioneers Harlem Spartans

This is quite light compared to much of the UK drill scene which is much more violent and morbid both in sound and content, but emphasizes the frequent references to stabbings and carrying knives, along with the braggadocio nature in which they are delivered. All of these give the impression of stabbing not only as a frequent occurrence in the UK but of the UK and London more specifically as the stabbing capital of the world. Even Donald Trump weighed in on the supposed stabbing epidemic in London during an NRA event, claiming that the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel 'is like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds.' 

Yet the statistics paint a different story: for starters, the U.S., despite the prevalence and access to guns, has a higher number of stabbings per person than the UK. In 2020 for example, the US saw 1739 homicides by knives or cutting instruments, whereas the UK saw 275. To compare apples with apples, the rate of fatal stabbings per million in the UK was 4.07, whereas the rate of fatal stabbings in the U.S. was 5.29 per million. For an argument as to why gun laws are ineffective, the pro-gun lobby will have to look elsewhere. The elephant in the room however is just that, the disparity in gun deaths between the US and the UK: 13,663 for the US, 30 in the UK, with a firearms homicide rate per million of 41.5 for the US and 0.044 for the UK. Thus the idea that the UK is an example of the prevalence of stabbings due to strict gun laws can be put to bed. The prevalence of stabbings in the UK and firearms in the US though accurate for each country in terms of the main methods of homicides respectively, are not a good indication of the comparative statistics in the country. It is certainly plausible that with strict gun laws, there would be an increase in stabbings in the US, but it is hard to argue that there would be anything close to 13,000 more fatal stabbings in the US.

To quickly also put to bed the Shinzo Abe situation, there are obviously few laws that can prevent someone making a homemade gun out of water supply pipes and a wooden board. Nevertheless a cursory look at gun deaths and gun crime in Japan should be enough for any pro-gun advocate to weep in shame: In the year 2021, there were 10 shooting incidents in the whole of Japan, a country with a population of 126 million people, and 1 homicide from firearms. It goes without saying cultural factors are hugely important in any analysis of the causes of gun crime, but Japan is an embarrassingly poor example of ineffective gun laws. Even countries with fairly robust gun cultures like Australia were able to introduce effective policies to prevent gun crime, with more than a million guns collected and destroyed in the wake of devastating massacres in a country with only 18 million people. Whilst there are difficult and nuanced conversations to be had about guns in America, none can be had without being honest about the reality in other rich western countries, and to do so requires more than lazy slogans and retorts that only seek to preserve the status quo.