“The perps” gives away a huge flaw in your thinking, that people are inherently good or inherently bad and that “bad” people are motivated to do bad things always and will always find a way to do them and “good” people don’t. This is entirely incorrect and has been proven so false for so long that any further point made without understanding this should be dismissed out of hand.

America has dramatically worse rates of knife crime than the western countries it likes to point at though. Doesn't that undermine your argument?

Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.

You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.

> Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones?

Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.