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Minnesota has all kinds of Trumpers and all they do all day is shoot
Americans.

The Surprising Geography of Gun Violence

America’s regions are poles apart when it comes to gun deaths and the
cultural and ideological forces that drive them.

POLITICO illustration/Source: Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University

By Colin Woodard

04/23/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Updated: 04/24/2023 01:31 PM EDT

Colin Woodard is a POLITICO Magazine contributing writer and director of
the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for
International Relations and Public Policy. He is the author of six books including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional
Cultures of North America.

Listen to the southern right talk about violence in America and you’d
think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern
front.

In October, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed crime
in New York City was “out of control” and blamed it on George Soros.
Another Sunshine State politico, former president Donald Trump, offered
his native city up as a Democrat-run dystopia, one of those places “where
the middle class used to flock to live the American dream are now war
zones, literal war zones.” In May 2022, hours after 19 children were
murdered at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott swatted back suggestions that the state could save lives by implementing tougher gun laws by proclaiming “Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove
that thesis.”

In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away
the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while
the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death
rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New
York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in
cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is
most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments
for decades.

If you grew up in the coal mining region of eastern Pennsylvania your
chance of dying of a gunshot is about half that if you grew up in the coalfields of West Virginia, three hundred miles to the southwest.
Someone living in the most rural counties of South Carolina is more than
three times as likely to be killed by gunshot than someone living in the equally rural counties of New York’s Adirondacks or the impoverished
rural counties facing Mexico across the lower reaches of the Rio Grande.

The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but
the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded
rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence —
and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the
result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of
insights into the problem are revealed.

To do so you need to more accurately delineate America’s regional
cultures. Forget the U.S. Census divisions, which arbitrarily divide the country into a Northeast, Midwest, South and West using often meaningless
state boundaries and a willful ignorance of history. The reason the U.S.
has strong regional differences is because our swath of the North
American continent was settled by rival colonial projects that had very
little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard
for today’s state boundaries.
Clockwise from top left: The remnants of police tape are visible Sunday
morning April 16, 2023, near the tennis courts at Chickasaw Park in
Louisville, Ky. following a shooting; Police cars and cordon tape block
Main Street near the Old National Bank after a mass shooting in
Louisville, Kentucky; A bullet hole is visible in the glass transom over
the door at the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio in Dadeville, Ala.,
Sunday, April 16, 2023; People visit a makeshift memorial for victims of
the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2018, in
Las Vegas.

The geography of gun violence is the result of differences at once
regional, cultural and historical. | Sam Upshaw/Louisville Courier
Journal via AP; Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images via AP; Jeff Amy/AP Photo; John Locher/AP Photo

Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England, the Dutch-
settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded
Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-led upland backcountry of the
Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different ethnographic, religious, economic and ideological characteristics. They were rivals and sometimes enemies, with even the British ones lining up on opposite sides
of conflicts like the English Civil War in the 1640s. They settled much
of the eastern half and southwestern third of what is now the U.S. in
mutually exclusive settlement bands before significant third party in- migration picked up steam in the 1840s.

In the process they laid down the institutions, symbols, cultural norms
and ideas about freedom, honor and violence that later arrivals would
encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Some states lie entirely or almost entirely within one of these regional cultures, others are split
between them, propelling constant and profound disagreements on politics
and policy alike in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California
and Oregon. Places you might not think have much in common, southwestern Pennsylvania and the Texas Hill Country, for instance, are actually at
the beginning and end of well documented settlement streams; in their
case, one dominated by generations of Scots-Irish and lowland Scots
settlers moving to the early 18th century Pennsylvania frontier and later
down the Great Wagon Road to settle the upland parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, and then into the Ozarks, North and
central Texas, and southern Oklahoma. Similar colonization movements link
Maine and Minnesota, Charleston and Houston, Pennsylvania Dutch Country
and central Iowa.

I unpacked this story in detail in my 2011 book American Nations: A
History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, and you
can read a summary here. But, in brief, the contemporary U.S. is divided between nine large regions — with populations ranging from 13 to 63
million — and four small enclaves of regional cultures whose centers of
gravity lie outside the U.S. For space and clarity, I’m going to set
aside the enclaves — parts of the regions I call New France, Spanish
Caribbean, First Nation, and Greater Polynesia — but they were included
in the research project I’m about to share with you.

Understanding how these historical forces affect policy issues — from gun control to Covid-19 responses — can provide important insights into how
to craft interventions that might make us all safer and happier. Building coalitions for gun reform at both the state and federal level would
benefit from regionally tailored messaging that acknowledged traditions
and attitudes around guns and the appropriate use of deadly violence are
much deeper than mere party allegiance. “A famous Scot once said ‘let me
make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,’ because
culture is extremely powerful,” says Carl T. Bogus of Roger Williams
University School of Law, who is a second amendment scholar. “Culture
drives politics, law and policy. It is amazingly durable, and you have to
take it into account.” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography- of-gun-violence-00092413

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