“Third Way hopes to combat the media and political narrative that crime is a Democratic problem, occurring mostly in big blue cities and fueled by lax policies,”
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/murder-rate-high-trump-republican-states
Personally, I believe murder rates have little or nothing to do with law enforcement. The law is just the last thing to get involved.
Violence is a weak mind trying to express itself forcefully. Places with high rates of violence are also places with low rates of education. Kids aren’t given the basic skills to mediate disagreements. Whoever can hit the hardest wins the playground arguments. That is the only skill they take into adulthood.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
A dollar against a do-nut says that those murder prone states have higher rates of gun ownership than the states with less murderous people. The gun-lovers’ mantra says that an “armed society is a polite society” and, laughably, that the solution to gun violence is more guns. It just ain’t so. As on many subjects, reality has a liberal bias.
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Not an anomally, but definitely meaningless.
To properly associate murder rates with political orientation would require a vastly more sophisticated study, not to mention objective, tested, standard definitions of political orientation.
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Only meaningless to those asleep. Wake up and smell the reality.
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There is no reality to smell in your story. I have told you why. So has Dr. Tabor.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Red states have Blue cities, which accounts for those stats.
Crime and murder are local, not statewide, problems. In Louisiana, New Orleans, and neighboring Jefferson Parrish account for most murders (my nephew was murdered in Jefferson when he gave a schoolmate a ride home and drove into an ambush.)
But when those statistics are broken down by county, Red States are pretty safe outside of Blue cities. The Red State problem is a myth.
And it’s even more localized than that. Consider murder in Chesapeake North and South of I-64.
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Red states have blue cities.
Blue states have blue cities. In fact, they have bigger and bluer blue cities. That is why they are blue. Duh.
So you “analysis” does not hold water. IMHO.
States controlled by Republicans are more violent than states controlled by Democrats. That is the simple fact of the matter.
Personally, I have my own theory. Violent criminals tend to be dumb. Republicans tend to be dumb. The underlying cause of both maladies – dumb people.
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You should get your party to run on that.
Did you read the cite?
Blue cities in Red states are more violent than suburbs and rural areas.
Blue cities in Blue states are more violent than suburbs and rural areas.
Cities, especially those with Blue mayors and prosecutors are violent.
Population concentration is the problem.
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“You should get your party to run on that . . .”
Hillary tried that. It did not go well. Does not change the fact that she was right. Nor does it change my theory stated above – the connecting link that explains why blue states have lower murder rates than red states is dumb, violent people. They vote Republican, they have guns, and they use them.
You have not addressed the obvious flaw in your “analysis.” Blue states have big blue cities with “population concentration” even more than red states.
You are wrong about rural areas. Some of the most violent states are largely rural.
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Sure, those big blue cities where the murders happened are just full of dumb, violent, Republican street gangs.
Gang warfare is clearly a Republican problem, right?
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“Gang warfare is clearly a Republican problem, right?”
It is not a Democrat problem. Duh! It is an American problem exacerbated by inadequate control of deadly weapons. But, if it has to be assigned to one party rather than the other, it is the party whose only policy is to cut taxes on the well-t0-do who gets the lion’s share of the blame. It is hopeless poverty and inadequate public services that lead to violence and that has been the case for centuries.
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Wow
No, it is not poverty. Poor country folk don’t kill each other.
The root cause is the bipartisan war on drugs(which drugs won.)
But the locally controlling factor is the lack of prosecution and under sentencing of violence.
https://virginianewstime.com/norfolk-court-statistics-show-a-low-conviction-rate-for-murder/130434/
And much of the blame is the lack of cooperation by citizens in big cities. Witnesses don’t come forward or don’t show up to testify.
Democrat controlled cities are just centers for rot.
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“Wow!”
“No, it is not poverty. Poor country folk don’t kill each other.”
The Hell they don’t.
The causal link between poverty and violence is not even remotely debatable. It has been clear for centuries.
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Show me
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“Show me”
I already have. You just won’t accept the evidence. Largely rural red states have significantly higher homicide rates than more urban blue states.
https://www.wsj.com/story/murder-rates-soar-in-rural-america-bb431022
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OK, your article says that post pandemic the rural murder rate went up 25% at the same time it went up 30% in cities.
Certainly the pandemic polices caused a lot of angst everywhere.
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“Poor country folk don’t kill each other.”
Two of the mass shootings in California last week were “poor people”. And they occurred in RED areas of a BLUE state.
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“Consider murder in Chesapeake North and South of I-64.”
Chesapeake south of I-64 is known as the Great Dismal Swamp. No one keeps statistics on bears mugging deers in the berry patch.
And South Chesapeake is not crime-free. Greenbriar Mall is the only shopping center on the planet where I got stalked and had to call security to escort me to my car. In the parts of South Chesapeake that are inhabited, crime rates are no better than in North Chesapeake.
As for Paul’s observation: “Violent criminals tend to be dumb. Republicans tend to be dumb. The underlying cause of both maladies – dumb people.” I agree 100%. I was trying to be polite by saying “uneducated.” But DUMB is the correct word. Education helps, but there’s no cure for the willfully stupid.
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There was a reason Texas banned men from wearing guns on their hips. It was getting too dangerous for people to walk down the streets. Even if they weren’t involved in a gunfight, they had a good chance of getting hit in the crossfire. Everybody and his brother carrying a gun did not make for a safe society. For nearly a 100 years, Texans lived perfectly normal lives, not thinking they needed to carry a gun. Then they entered the “non-woke zone.”
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At what time did Texas have a murder rate comparable to Norfolk today?
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“At what time did Texas have a murder rate comparable to Norfolk today?”
That is an apples to oranges comparison if there ever was one. Recently Norfolk was number 43 on the list of most deadly cities. 42 cities – mostly in red states – were worse including Number 42 on the list – Dallas TX.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/
But to specifically answer your question, the overall Texas homicide rate was higher than Norfolk’s homicide rate today (about 14.8) in the early 1980s.
https://www.macrotrends.net/states/texas/murder-homicide-rate-statistics
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And that was while Texas limited concealed and forbade open carry.
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NY State has a much lower homicide rate than Texas. NYC was still lower than Dallas for sure.
I don’t think your generalization about safer red states hold a lot of water.
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New York doesn’t have the cartels on their border.
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Ok, let’s try a slew of red states with smaller cities than NY.
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Mississippi has two of the deadliest counties in the US. Coahoma County, Mississippi, Around 27,000,
with Clarksdale as the county seat at around 16,000.
Hardly a big city. But a lot of homicides in the county.
Washington County, MS at around 45,000 and Greenville at around 30,000. Again, pretty small towns. Rural, one might add. But lots of dead people apparently.
Throw in Macon County, Alabama so we are not picking on Mississippi, population around 19,000, with Tuskegee around 9,000. Pretty small potatoes again. And yet they are tied with murders in DC, 30 times its size.
Must be the heat in Dixie.
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Worse, they have Sicilian. Russian and other assorted “mafias”.
But what they did have was tighter gun control.
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Are you worried about Norfolk’s murder rate? Would it be better if everybody wore a gun on their hip? Maybe you’d feel safer if everybody had an assault rifle slung over their shoulder? You wouldn’t necessarily have to be murdered or die in a gun fight. You could get pinged by some guy reaching for his hankie in a restaurant and hitting a trigger, or some kid grabbing mommy’s Luger in the grocery line, or some teenager shooting bullets in the air for fun on the Fourth of July. The possibilities are endless.
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“Gang warfare is clearly a Republican problem, right?”
I dunno. Do you count Sovereign Citizens, or the Proud Boys, or the Oath Keepers, as gangs? And are you referring to gangs that attack Congress or gangs that just fight each other, like the Russian mafia? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure most of them aren’t Democrats.
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Except for in West Side Story, there are no white gangs, according to Don.
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