How does Canada manage to keep its crime so low?

STRAUSSIAN: How does Canada manage to keep its crime so low despite bordering the US?
I’m an America, but the Canadians have done a good job keeping crime down. The US has a murder rate of 4.8 murders per 100,000 people per year, while Canada’s rate is three times lower at 1.6. That’s pretty incredible.

Any Canadian criminal who wants to do so can cross the US border on his passport and smuggle back as many guns as he wants, but still, the crime rate in Canada is much lower than the US rate.

How does Canada manage to achieve this? Is it because it does not have a border with Mexico?

Answers and Views:

Answer by StephenG
gun control

Answer by The Saskwatch
Because we are the nicest people you will ever meet.

Answer by hardwoodrods
It’s all in the statistical reporting which can be manipulated any way the compiler wants. Have a link?

Answer by ahandle101
Canada doesn’t have Detroit.

Answer by FIFA
I really really dont want to pull the race card here

Answer by Vice Pays to Virtue
There is an almost linear relationship between socioeconomic inequality and violent crime. Canada has much less income inequality and a much better safety-net for those at the bottom. Consequently, violent crime is much lower.

I’m not pretending that this is the sole factor at work here (Canada has, for example, a much lower population density than the US, and fewer problems with people smuggling and illegal drugs), but I think it is certainly a significant factor.

Answer by Me Ne Frego
I’m sure I am not allowed to offer demogrpahic differences and population density as an explanation.

The only one the anybody ever seems to want to hear confirmed is that Canadians are just somehow better than Americans.

Answer by Ollicopter
To start with the population of Canada is one tenth that of the U S or less. Most Canadians live close to the U S border. The rest is so much like the wild wild west there can be no accurate statistics for it.

Answer by Arthur
Different demographics. Canada is over 90% white. Now I know everybody wants to think that race has nothing to do with it, but if you have spent any time in the states, you know that gangs are typically black or latino. That is part of the culture.

-Only 10% of gang members are white
-Blacks are 15x more likely to be in a gang, and Hispanics are 19x more likely.

Blacks are 7 times more likely to commit a murder, are responsible for more than 50% of the murders in the US over the past 35 years
Hispanics are 3 times more likely to commit a murder than a white person
Asians (who represent the majority of minorities in Candida) are 1/4 as likely to commit a violent crime as a white person.

Answer by picador
Apart from the time of the Vietnam war, when American draft dodgers flocked here in droves, there has been little South-North movement of people across the border. Immigrants come from elsewhere, and they are admitted according to Canada’s need for manpower. We know very well which kind of people are likely to create crime-ridden ghettos as a matter of culture, and we invite them to say where they are. Such crime as we have largely comes from two sources. One is the aboriginal population, about which we can do nothing. The other is the offspring of Caribbean immigrants who came in the 60s and 70s when there was a need for nurses, nannies and the like.
So, to answer your question, crime is suppressed to the extent that people prone to commit it are kept out.