It is important to recognize that gun violence is not a problem unique to large American cities. Rural communities, particularly in red states, are experiencing some of the highest rates of gun violence in the United States.
This is becoming really apparent, based on population, it is far more dangerous to live outside of cities. Guns are being used in rural America to settle even the most trivial of arguments.
Yep, how many stories have come to light in the last year or so where some braindead hick that subsists entirely on a diet of Tucker Carlson and Breitbart winds up murdering someone for turning around in their driveway or mistakenly ringing the wrong doorbell?
Conservative media has had these people utterly terrified of their own shadows for decades and predictably, now that the rhetoric has reached critical mass in the Trump era these lunatics are getting violent.
That happened about a half hour away from where I live and the victim was the same age as my older son so that one hit hard.
If I need to turn around and the only way to do so is to pull slightly into someone’s driveway, I’ll do that. It shouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary at all. Worst case scenario, pick up the phone and call 911 to report the situation. There’s no reason to go charging out, guns blazing, because someone was turning around in your driveway.
Are you calling my arguments trivial!? Those are fightin’ words. 🔫
Slow down Cletus, dem doing no harm!
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So you’re saying convincing poorly educated people they absolutely need guns and that they should live in an insanely heightened state of fear leads to bad outcomes?
Shocking isn’t it.
My father (right wing Trump supporter who watches FOX News) is always telling me how crime in NYC is out of control. According to him, merely setting foot in NYC means you’ll get mugged, beaten up, and then shot for good measure. Yet, all the evidence actually points to crime rates falling in blue areas like NYC and rising in rural (red) areas.
Sadly, the FOX News watching conservatives will just say “if crime is this bad here, imagine how much worse it is in blue areas” without actually looking at any statistics.
I’m more concerned with being in a place where everyone is carrying guns. Seems like things are more likely to end deadly. I also thought that was the lesson of the “Wild West.”
The Wild West is fiction. Dodge city had tighter gun control than New York ever has.
Someone else already pointed it out, but I’ll reiterate it, the “wild west” actually had strict gun control laws. The movies show armed strangers riding into town. In reality, that stranger would need to report to the local sheriff’s office and turn over his guns. (He’d get them back when he was leaving.)
When the Supreme Court ruled that any gun control measures had to have a historical precedent, they conveniently ignored what really happened in the wild west and pretended that the movie version was real life.
Curious that they would say that when there was no precedent to their reinterpretation of the second amendment.
Long historical precedents are only important if they don’t like the law. If they like the law, then they’ll find justification even if they need to misquote some 15th century philosopher.
Another statistic proving where the problem lies.
In New York City, for example, 93 percent of crime guns recovered from 2017 to 2021 could be traced to a licensed dealer in another state.
Most of the guns recovered in Chicago come from Indiana which has a history of ignoring gun sale regulations.
Exactly. Opponents of gun control love pointing to Chicago’s gun violence. “See? They enacted gun control and they still have gun violence.” Yes, because guns now need to be brought into Chicago from neighboring areas with lax gun policies. If we had strong nationwide gun control laws, you wouldn’t have this. Could people import their guns from another country? Sure, but that’s a lot harder than driving one county over to grab some guns.
You can’t concentrate Glocks into a stronger powder or breed them to increase potency. Nationwide gun laws work.
Australia is proof
As a resident of Metro Detroit I am excited about the decrease here. The rate per 100k residents is now below Cleveland, OH; Columbia, SC; Milwaukee, WI; even Richmond, VA. I am very proud of the current Mayor and all the organizations thru the city that have worked tirelessly for decades because they believed we could change. This place is night and day compared to any other time in my life. With our amazing architecture and low cost of living I can finally see a revival happening. Just got to keep the violence on a downward trend.
Cities in blue states,8 based on how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election, are consistently safer from guns than cities in red states, regardless of which party is represented in city leadership.
From 2018 to 2021, red-state cities experienced larger increases in gun violence rates than blue-state cities.
In 2023, blue-state cities are experiencing larger declines in gun violence rates than red-state cities.
I can really only personally speak about Portland, but the decline seems steeper because the increase had been so dramatic.
January to August shooting numbers:
2019 - 276
2020 - 497
2021 - 850
2022 - 898
2023 - 725So, yeah, a dramatic difference from 2022, but still not back to a pre-pandemic baseline.
If you look at full year numbers:
2019 - 413
2020 - 919
2021 - 1315
2022 - 1309
2023 - 725 (through August)
