“Iceland, ranked the world's most peaceful country, is reeling after police said that a young woman whose body was found on a beach was killed in a homicide. Gunnar Runar Sveinbjornsson, the spokesman for the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police, said Wednesday that Birna Brjansdottir, 20, went missing on Jan. 14 after a night out with friends.”

According to the Icelandic Sagas, Iceland was a violent place a thousand years go or so. People getting stabbed, hit in the head with an axe and burned out of their homes was pretty common. Since then Icelanders have become much more peaceful. Greenland, where the suspected perpetrators are from, is a different story. Contemporary Iceland has an average annual murder rate of 1.8 per 100,000 of the population with no murders at all some years. Greenland on the other hand experienced a mean average murder rate of 15.23 per 100,000 of the population over the 17 years from 1995 to 2011, with a high rate of 30.48 in 2001 and a low of 1.76 in 2011. Keep in mind that Greenland only has a total population of about 56,000 people. Compare sparsely populated Greenland with the populous USA, with a nationwide murder rate of 4.9 per 100,000 for a total population of some 320 million people. So what’s up with Greenland? The Inuit people there have some serious anger management problems, combined with alcohol and drug abuse issues. This gives the country a very high murder rate despite its very low rate of crimes against person and property overall.