Is it alright to think about race?

The USA's murder rate is 2 or 3 times that of most other developed nations we would prefer to compare ourselves to. Here's the thing: the nations with higher murder rates seem to have two or three of the following features: ethnic diversity, heavy drug trafficking, and government corruption.

Race-based analysis can destroy one's standing and reputation, but I am curious how White America compares in these statistical categories to whites in other majority-white nations, and how non-whites (and/or non-Judeo-Christians) fare in those nations. Are the most homogeneous nations the most crime-free? Are there similar disparities between whites and non-whites in education and income in other countries as in the United States? What about drug laws and imprisonment rates? Is the fact that the U.S. is more ethnically and racially diverse causing the statistics to lag behind? For instance, is white America's life expectancy, infant morality, etc. as good as any, and are non-whites, with short life expectancies, dragging the average down?

One reason to ask such questions is to answer what role guns play in American society. Does high gun ownership and high gun-related deaths tell the whole story, or are not most of those gun deaths drug- and gang-related, involving a tiny segment of the population? If white crime rates and white gun deaths are already low, how will gun control make anyone safer? And don't the stiff drug penalties, reflected in our high prison population (particularly, high non-white prison population), make the drug trade that much more high-risk and lethal?

The purpose is not to "blame minorities," but to get a more realistic assessment in differences in quality of life in America. As a nation becomes increasingly diverse, people with values and lifestyles different from the established white norm will probably not perform as well in the statistical measure that nation values. Some of this will be inevitable, but some policies, such as the War on Drugs, only make things worse for non-whites.