The people who produce the Virginian Pilot are not smart, so they are probably unaware of these statistics, but even if they were, they would not print them because that does not fit their story line.
Democrats think they can win on this issue because the Media is biased and misinforms the public about “gun violence.”
Crime is a people problem. If you understand nothing else about crime, you must understand this — crime is committed by people. It is not committed by inanimate objects, and while data on criminal activity can be charted as a trend over time, trends don’t commit crimes, people do. There is a word for people who commit crimes; we call these people “criminals” and, if anyone is interested in investigating trends, one trend is fairly consistent — most violent criminals are repeat offenders, and will not stop this behavioral pattern unless they are locked up in prison.
Democrats do not want to discuss crime as a people problem, but rather as a gun problem, because (a) most gun owners are Republicans and (b) most criminals are Democrats. Or, that is to say, the violent crime problem in America is largely concentrated in urban areas where Democrats get the majority of the vote.
Research by John R. Lott Jr. highlights just how geographically concentrated the murder problem is in the United States. Of the more than 3,000 counties in the country, 52 percent had zero murders in 2020, while the 31 counties with the highest murder rates (the worst 1 percent) had 42 percent of the nation’s murders. Expand the focus to the worst 2 percent (62 counties), and these accounted for more than half (56 percent) of U.S. murders in 2020. Lott concluded: “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas …”
Yes, but what about “gun violence”? What about the inflammatory rhetoric of Democrats demonizing the National Rifle Association (NRA) as somehow to blame for America’s crime problem? Among other things, Lott took into account rates of firearm ownership, and found an inverse relationship between the prevalence of murder and rates of gun ownership: “According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, the household gun ownership rate in rural areas was 79% higher than in urban areas. Suburban households are 37.9% more likely to own guns than urban households. Despite lower gun ownership, urban areas experience much higher murder rates.”
So much for the correlation between gun ownership and crime. What do we know about the correlation between politics and crime? The five U.S. cities with the highest per capita murder rates are St. Louis (69.4 per 100,000 population), Baltimore (51.1), New Orleans (40.6), Detroit (39.7), and Cleveland (33.7). In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden got 82 percent of the vote in St. Louis, 87 percent in Baltimore, 83 percent in New Orleans, 94 percent in Detroit and 80 percent in Cleveland. In other words, the most dangerous cities in America are all Democratic Party strongholds.
