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Right winger fight preceded early morning black shooting at Minneapolis' Nicollet Mall light rail station, police say

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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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Right winger fight preceded early morning black shooting at Minneapolis' Nicollet Mall light rail station, police say Colin Brown <X@Y.com> - 2024-09-03 01:08 +0000

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