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   XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
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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   
      
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