The Surprising Geography of Gun Violence By Colin Woodard

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.

  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 18^th 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.”