You've heard it a dozen times before: American society is so much more violent other Western nations, there's so much more crime here. It seems one of every several pages you encounter on the Internet -- whether from big-league news organizations or wacky nut-ball web sites -- mentions this 'fact'.

Only problem is, it's false.

Until recently, all you had to do was check the crime stats on the Interpol site to discover the US actually has a lot less crime than most other nations, as I did for this article, written just ten months ago:

[Crimes per 100,000 people:]

9927 - England and Wales
8572 - Canada
7736 - Germany
6941 - France
4161 - United States

Guess what? This data has now been shielded from public view. No longer will people be able to verify that England and Canada's crime rate is more double that of the US.

According to the page, only the police have the right to know how good a job they, and our governments, are doing in protecting us from crime. Well, what right have we, the public, to see such data? After all, we paid for it:

Interpol is primarily financed by its member countries whose governments pay annual contributions.

So what's going on here? Is it just that it's too much of a burden to allow the public to see they internal crime data they've paid for, the same data that's been available for years?

Or is this some dark machination, perhaps based on the fact that Interpol is headquartered in Spain, and neither the new virulently anti-American Spanish Socialist government nor the EU has any vested interest in letting people discover the real crime situation in that squalid oligarchy they're building over there?

Inquiring minds want to know.