As Americans suffer the aftershock of another mass shooting, Morning Consult survey data from 17 countries finds overwhelming majorities of adults in highly developed nations see gun violence and overall crime as problems in the United States, and while views aren’t as dim in the developing world, they still lean negative.
Economic and cultural peers are most likely to have negative views of the U.S.
Gun violence is much more prevalent in the United States than in other developed countries. The mass shooting on Monday at Michigan State University was the 67th thus far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That discrepancy is also evident in global sentiment, with wealthier countries tending to hold the most negative views of gun violence in the United States, though sentiment is also negative in many developing countries.
The split between highly developed countries and the rest of the world on attitudes toward crime in the United States is more pronounced. While people in highly developed countries tend to hold strongly negative views of crime in the United States, more adults than not in Chile, Indonesia, Peru, Colombia and Brazil have positive perceptions on that issue.
A different dynamic plays out when it comes to policing in the United States, with views much more likely to skew negative in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom than anywhere else, perhaps due to higher U.S. media and news consumption. Roughly 2 in 5 adults in the three Anglosphere countries have negative perceptions of U.S. policing, higher shares than in other developed countries such as Germany, France and Japan. Meanwhile, people in many developing countries are more likely to have positive perceptions of policing in the United States than negative ones.
The Morning Consult surveys were conducted Oct. 14-18, Oct. 26-29, Nov. 16-21 and Dec. 15-30, 2022, among a representative sample of 1,000 adults in each country, with unweighted margins of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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