KansanTim
Established
I have no objection to your feeling the UK is more violent than the USA or mainland Europe--I've lived in all three and spent a fair amount of time in drinking establishments in each, and my UK experience involved both angrier people and more events that actually came to blows (none involving me, fortunately). So my anecdotal experience actually backs you up.
However, with the statistics, I suggest you take any "most violent" declaration with a grain of salt. Comparing murder rates to murder rates (as some other comments have done, and the USA is worse than the UK) is usually an apples-to-apples comparison, and certainly is pretty valid between nations at similar levels of development. However, with combined crime statistics, once you add in other crimes, like assaults, robberies, even rape, you get wide variance in reporting, where things like culture and police effectiveness can greatly affect rates, something that can vary within a country or even between city neighborhoods. What I am suggesting is that comparing one nation to another on something like assaults might say much more about rates in reporting assault to police than the actual rate of assault.
Finally, I'll add that there are at least two ways, and perhaps more that I haven't heard of, crime statistics are compiled--some studies look at reported crimes to police, while others conduct surveys asking samples of the population if they have been victims of certain crimes. Both have flaws in determining the "true" crime rate, and you can probably imagine reasons for how the choice of study type might bias in favor of one country or another.
