A new study destroys anti-gun narratives and sheds more light on the reality of murders in America. A mere 1% of counties in America account for 19% of our murder rate. Murder is highly concentrated in a few areas of the country. Most of America has an extremely low murder rate which is skewed by a few insane high crime areas.
The anti-gun lie is that, because America has more guns than most European nations, gun ownership is to blame for our higher crime rates. In fact, research is continually showing that most of America has extremely low rates of crime despite having much higher rates of gun ownership.
Check this out:
This week, a new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) revealed just how concentrated murders are in the U.S. Citing county level data from 2014, researchers determined that a small fraction of all counties are responsible for a majority of the murders in the U.S.
According to the report, just 2 percent of all of the counties in the country account for 51 percent of the nation’s murders. The top 5 percent of counties account for 68 percent of all murders. Further, 69 percent of all counties experienced one murder or less in 2014.
It is correct to expect that counties with large population centers are going to necessarily account for more murders. However, as the report details, the most dangerous counties account for an outsized proportion of murders given their population. The report noted, “The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders.”
CPRC also pointed out that murders are often highly concentrated within a given county. Citing Los Angeles County, which experienced 526 murder in 2014, CPRC showed that there were wide swaths of the county with virtually no murders.
CPRC’s data dovetails with other research on the concentration of criminal violence. In recent years, researchers from Yale University have studied the concentration of violence in certain social networks. In a 2015 piece for the Hartford Courant that succinctly outlines some of this research, Yale Ph.D. candidate Michael Sierra-Arévalo explained that Yale University sociologists determined “70 percent of all shootings in Chicago can be located in a social network composed of less than 6 percent of the city’s population.” Sierra-Arévalo also cited a study from researchers at Harvard and Yale, that examined violence perpetrated with guns in Boston. This research showed that violence is heavily concentrated even within a given city, determining that “between 1980 and 2009, 89 percent of Boston streets never experienced an episode of gun violence,” and that “more than half of all the gun violence during the almost 30-year period occurred in only 5 percent of the city’s streets.”
The bottom line is that the vast majority of murders happen in an extremely small area, amongst a small segment of the population; that is engaged in the gang culture. In places like Chicago the vast majority of murders happen with guns that are illegal to begin with.
Wether it’s the murder rate in Chicago or South America, the cause of high murder rates is crystal clear. Gun control has no correlation with murder rates and the existence of gang culture has everything to do with it.
Europe has a lower murder rates because they have fewer MS13 gangbangers killing each other (duh!). Brazil and Chicago, IL have high murder rates because they have a small percentage of the population in the gang culture, shooting each other.
The ability of law abiding citizens to possess guns has never been correlated with murder rates. Both Brazil and Chicago have intense gun control laws but high murder rates, meanwhile 69% of American counties had one murder or less despite having some of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world.