The thing is that personal politics don't end up being a personal thing because they result in real policies that guide real material outcomes.
At this point saying one is uninterested in living in a red state could be about party politics, but it also could just as much about not being inclined to subject onesself to starkly higher risks of being shot and killed (the outcome of someone's personal politics).
> 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.
Avoiding red states to avoid being shot would be extremely dumb for many reasons.
1. Cities and neighborhoods in any state can be safe, even in the states with the most shootings
2. If you have enough money to choose to live in another state, you're probably not going to be living in an extremely poor area that is the most likely to be beset with gun violence
3. Other commonplace things are much more likely to kill you than being shot (cars, for example).
Mass shootings aren't correlated with poverty. Guns are expensive.
Most mass shooters are disaffected folks in the "middle class" who have money to acquire weapons (or access to weapons via relatives) and time to spend immersing themselves in online right-wing cesspits.
Actual poor people are too busy trying to grind and survive.
Most of those cities on the less than 100k list have Dems in government as well, but imo this isn't a Dem-GOP issue and more of a "urban" versus "rural" issue - specifically these are all cities that have been left behind due to an oversized population of minorities (eg. Anchorage+Fairbanks for Native Americans, Memphis+Pine Bluffs+Monroe+Alexandria+Little Rock for African Americans, ABQ+Lubbock for Latino Americans) and severely deindustrialized (eg. Memphis, ABQ, Lubbock, Little Rock, Danville) due to bipartisan support of globalization in the 1990s and the collapse of the energy sector in the 1990s-2000s
Mass shootings are technically any that have a victim count over a certain number and the vast majority of those are committed by criminals with cheap weapons.
Guns are not expensive, they're way cheaper than a car. The Hipoint C9 retails new for $199. If you can afford a mobile phone (read: almost everyone in the USA) you can afford multiple guns.
School shooters (let's be precise, as that is what people are talking about when talking about mass shootings, not gang violence or other stuff) want to look cool, and ARs are cool looking and everyone markets them up on both sides.
Which is why my simple modification to solve it all is mandate that all firearms be hot pink with a hello kitty logo.
It might be the outcome of racist policies or general racist attitudes but they are statistically correct.
There is a high correlation between between ethnic or racial makeup of a certain area and crime and gun violence. I’m not sure simply handwaving this by calling everyone who points that out a ‘racist’ is the most productive attitude…
Generally the same applies to poverty though which is probably a more direct indicator than race.
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Some Red States are an absolute mess. Some of their stats resemble third world countries.
Their education systems are shoddy. Their drinking water systems are dangerous to health. Taxes are shameful: low taxes for the wealthy but high sales taxes which hurt the poor the most.
Not a fan of the GOP and I have actively worked with the DNC, but using HDI (which is the goto metric for comparing development across regions), most US states Red and Blue are roughly comparable to other western European peers.
The states that do lag significantly (MS+WV) are comparable to Portugal/Poland/Greece on developmental metrics, but they only represent ~1% of the entire American population and are anomalies due to historical social economic factors (that said, this should not mean that we should give up on them - we should in fact double down and invest in upgrading social infrastructure in laggard states).
That said, every single American state and territory fall strictly in the "Very Highly Developed" category from a development standpoint and calling them "3rd world" is only minimizing the actual suffering that exists in less developed countries as well as orientalizing actual poverty upliftment in former "3rd world regions" like China, India, Turkey, Mexico, ASEAN, the Warsaw Bloc, the Balkans, Southern Europe, South America, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.
I'd recommend comparing at the region level instead of by state government c. 2010-2023.
Different regions of the US became developed/first world at different times. The Mid-Atlantic and New England for example largely industrialized by the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Midwest by the 1930s, the Western US and Southwest by the 1950s, and the Southern States, Appalachia, and Puerto Rico by the 1980s-90s (thank you LBJ for your War against Poverty in the 60s).
A better comparison would be blue and red states within the same region in the US - for example, Blue Minnesota versus Red Wisconsin or Red Florida and Blue Virginia or Red New Hampshire and Blur Vermont.
The same issue exists within the EU as well btw - this is why Sweden can have some of the best developmental indicators in the world while Bulgaria can have developmental indicators comparable to developed regions of China and India.
> Some of their stats resemble third world countries.
Have you walked through the TL?
Comparing California and Texas can be interesting because the states are both dominated by a single party, so you see how both ideologies can go wrong. With Texas being like a developing country, I'm reminded of the winter power outage. They love free markets. It's not worth it to harden the electric grid for an event that rare that only lasts a few days. Picking on California, its K-12 education is in the bottom quartile.
I live in the SFBA and have far worse uptime and far higher prices than Texas. The smugness from Californians wrt/grid does not make any sense to me. I would trade for Texas electrical grid performance in less than a heartbeat.
There was a five hour long outage on Monday while the weather was perfectly lovely. And more than a week cumulative outage in March when the weather was merely a little wet.
Sorry, I didn't really mean to direct the comment at yours, but rather intended to build upon it. I meet a lot of folks around here who point to the Texas grid failure and snicker about how much better California is at regulating the grid. Yet I routinely put up with outages longer than Austin's under less-severe conditions.
Most of the SF Bay Area gets its power from PG&E, which is an investor-owned utility. Palo Alto and Santa Clara are exceptions; they have municipal power companies.
Most of the gun deaths in red states are suicides. So maybe the states are just very depressing places to live in? Like Wyoming outside of Jackson Hole, is a tough place to l is so has the nation’s highest suicide rate.
Native Texan living in the city. There has been only one time in my life I was near gun violence and it was 1/2 mile away. That didn't make me hate guns, it just made me consider concealed carrying again. Zero people I know have been near shootings or are worried about shootings, it's a nonissue in the real world and only seems scary because of news coverage.
This is such a propaganda piece. NYC has a per capita murder rate of 5.5 according to its latest report. There were 40 states with a lower murder rate [1]. The highest murder rates are all in blue cities [2]
Except we're not talking about overall murder rate, but rather about violence (both individual and systemic) specifically targeted at gender, sexual, and racial minorities.
What percentage of gays and minorities were shot in Provo or Lincoln compared to cities like San Francisco and Chicago? I am assuming you have statistics to back your statements.
The highest gun violence rates are in heavily blue cities like Detroit, St. Louis, Memphis and Baltimore.
Shooting isn't the only form of repression. It's not even the most prominent or insidious form. There's a big difference between murder and a hate crime.
Cop violence isn't counted in murder stats, by the way, because it's "lawful" and they're effectively above the law.
Edit: Actually I checked 2017-2020 and every year had way more hate crimes than Texas. CA has ~33% more population, but had triple the hate crimes. In 2021 CA somehow dropped from thousand+ hate crimes to like 40, so I'm guessing something is up with the data there.
> In 2020 California had more hate crime than Texas
Well there were significantly more cases of rape reported in Sweden than in most African or South Asian countries (and I mean up to 40 times more or so…). Something similar might be at play here.
I understand what you’re getting at but 94% of precincts in Texas reported these stats willingly and 97% in California, so I don’t think it’s underreporting.
Is the definition of what constitutes a ‘hate crime’ the same in Texas and California? (Probably one of the main reasons which explain the situation in Sweden)
Are people in Texas just as willing to report it as in California?
etc.
I’m not saying that hate crime is necessarily more prevalent in Texas. I have no clue. It just seems like a weird comparison to make when it’s not that clear you’re not comparing oranges to apples..
I mean both stats are from the FBI's database and they use all of this data to track hate crimes, so it's as close to apples and apples as you will get.
I find it more weird that you're immediately doubting the data because it goes against pre conceived notions.
Also from the website itself the definition is:
"The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program defines hate crime as a committed criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."
Looking at the data again personally I find it interesting that there was no anti white crime reported in CA but it was the third most reported hate crime in Texas
I don’t think so no. I’m curious what you think is a better source of data than the FBI who has a standardize definition of hate crime and collects it from all 50 states?
I’m not sure how much more comparable you can get, and if we go along your logic then the original point of this thread, which is that some people feel threatened in red states (apparently) because of their sexuality or similar, then there is no data that would ever validate or go against that mentality, since the data from each state by the federal bureau is not comparable right?
Then if we start going with anecdotes it gets nowhere because I’ve lived in both Texas and California and have traveled to many blue and red states and have seen way more discrimination/racism in blue states. But that’s a personal anecdote
if there are no reports of “ anti white crime ” in California however it’s not uncommon in Texas is it more likely that white people are never the target of hate crimes in California or that is’s under reported there (or over reported in Texas)?
> Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher
It makes no sense to put suicides in the same bucket as homicides, please stop trying to manipulate the discussion this way. There are more gun deaths from suicide than murder and accidents put together, so it massively skews the numbers.
Although many of the highest homicide states are in the South, such as Mississippi and Alabama, many are not, such as New Mexico and Illinois.
Region-wise, the contention "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" is not supported by the data. Taking the latest FBA violent crimes (2016 is the latest I could find online broken down by Metropolitan Statistical Area) homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants:
The safest MSAs in America, tied with zero homicides in 2016, are:
Albany, OR M.S.A.
Bangor, ME M.S.A.
Casper, WY M.S.A.
Columbus, IN M.S.A.
Dalton, GA M.S.A.
Danville, IL M.S.A.
Iowa City, IA M.S.A.
Lewiston-Auburn, ME M.S.A.
Missoula, MT M.S.A.
Ocean City, NJ M.S.A.
Oshkosh-Neenah, WI M.S.A.
Rochester, MN M.S.A.
St. George, UT M.S.A.
These are all relatively small, here are some larger MSAs with lower homicide rates than New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA M.S.A.:
Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH M.S.A.
Gainesville, FL M.S.A.
Midland, TX M.S.A.
Santa Fe, NM M.S.A.
Urban Honolulu, HI M.S.A.
Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR M.S.A
College Station-Bryan, TX M.S.A.
Fargo, ND-MN M.S.A.
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI M.S.A.
Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH M.S.A.
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA M.S.A.
El Paso, TX M.S.A.
Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, FL M.S.A.
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA M.S.A.
San Diego-Carlsbad, CA M.S.A.
Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, FL M.S.A.
Thus the contention of "the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence" does not appear supported by the data.
(EDIT: The most violent top 20 MSAs in the USA belie the notion of homicidal violence as being associated with a particular political party, on either side; it is a pan-American issue: Guayama, Puerto Rico M.S.A.
San Juan-Carolina-Caguas, Puerto Rico M.S.A.
Ponce, Puerto Rico M.S.A.
Fairbanks, AK M.S.A.
Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia, MI M.D.
New Orleans-Metairie, LA M.S.A.
Memphis, TN-MS-AR M.S.A.
Mayaguez, Puerto Rico M.S.A.
Mobile, AL M.S.A.
Philadelphia, PA M.D.
Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD M.S.A.
Savannah, GA M.S.A.
Auburn-Opelika, AL M.S.A
Flint, MI M.S.A.
Hammond, LA M.S.A.
Salinas, CA M.S.A.
Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights, IL M.D.
Albany, GA M.S.A.
Montgomery, AL M.S.A.
Shreveport-Bossier City, LA M.S.A.)
At this point saying one is uninterested in living in a red state could be about party politics, but it also could just as much about not being inclined to subject onesself to starkly higher risks of being shot and killed (the outcome of someone's personal politics).
eg. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising...
> 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.