The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => Topic started by: rangerrebew on November 14, 2017, 05:37:22 pm
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Study: Murder is Very Concentrated in a Few Parts of The USA [Map]
November 14, 2017 By Calvin Freiburger
Whenever something as horrific as the weekend’s Las Vegas mass shooting takes place, people have an understandable tendency to let it grow in their minds into a fear of an ever-present danger that could happen again at any moment.
So it’s important to take a step back and examine crimes such as homicide in context. The simple fact is that murders are rare in most of the United States … but the parts in which they aren’t rare tell us a great deal about the real solutions to gun violence, and how wildly they differ from the policy prescriptions of those doing the most to stoke fear.
http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/study-murder-concentrated-parts-usa-map
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That's true but also deceptive when done by geography and not population. A per capita representation would be more informative.
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https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-us-counties-2014-zero-murders-69-1-murder/
(https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Figure-2.jpg)
...Breaking down the most dangerous counties in Figure 2 shows over half the murders occur in just 2% of the counties, 37% in just the worst 1% of the counties....
...Gun Ownership
According to a 2013 PEW Research Center survey, the household gun ownership rate in rural areas was 2.11 times greater than in urban areas (“Why Own a Gun? Protection is Now Top Reason,” PEW Research Center, March 12, 2013). Suburban households are 28.6% more likely to own guns than urban households. Despite lower gun ownership, urban areas experience much higher murder rates. One should not put much weight on this purely “cross-sectional” evidence over one point in time and many factors determine murder rates, but it is still interesting to note that so much of the country has both very high gun ownership rates and zero murders....