Geography plays an important role in the American gun violence crisis

Gun violence in America has become one of the pressing issues facing the country. But did you know that gun deaths are far worse in some parts of the U.S. over others for a variety of complicated reasons?

The revelation that some areas of the country are home to more gun violence than others might not come as a surprise to you but what you might find interesting are the complicated reasons why gun violence is worse in some areas of the country over others.

Colin Woodard is the director of the Nationhood Lab at the Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy and he dug through decades of data in order to reveal gun deaths are worse in Republican areas. 

“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,” Woodard wrote in a piece for Politico. 

“Someone living in the most rural counties of South Carolina is more than three times as likely to be killed by a gunshot than someone living in the equally rural counties of New York’s Adirondacks,” Woodard added. 

Woodard went on to explain the reason why gun violence was worse in some areas is varied and has to do as much to do with how elites in various regions dealt with the gun deaths in their area as it did with cultural and historical reasons. 

So in order to make sense of gun deaths in America, Woodard argued that one would need to delineate how the federal government divided the country and instead look at America’s various regions through their cultural spotlight. 

"What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of deadly violence generally – and gun violence in particular – varies by region. It’s as if we live in separate countries, some of which have gun violence profiles that look like Canada’s, others that resemble the Philippines, Panama, or Peru," Woodward explained.

Woodard broke the country up into nine distinct and mostly self-explanatory cultural regions—including Yankeedom, New Netherland, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, The Midlands, Deep South, El Norte, Left Cost, and the Far West. 

Photo Credit Twitter @WoodardColin

In order to make his conclusion, Woodard analyzed data from the country’s different cultural areas between 2010 and 2020 and discovered that it was Republican-controlled regions that had the highest rates of gun deaths. 

For example, the area known as Greater Appalachia, a region encompassing all of today’s Appalachia and settled by people mostly from war-ravaged Northern Ireland, England, and the Scottish lowlands, had a gun death rate of 13.5 per 100,000 people. 

However, Woodard's self-defined Yankedom—a region that consists of New England, Upstate New York, and the northern parts of the Midwest—only had a gun death rate of 8.6. But was this due to the cultural differences between the two areas?

In his definition of Yankedom, Woodard explained the various areas comprising it were settled by Puritans who believed the perfect society could be engineered and so they went about trying to do so based on their religious ideals. 

“The common good—ensured by popular government—took precedence over individual liberty when the two were in conflict,” Woodard wrote. In contrast, Greater Appalachia is a region with a history of “personal sovereignty” and suspicion of “external authority.” 

Woodard explained that cultural histories certainly played a role in gun death rates but also noted that these cultural histories have fed into current laws, arguing that America’s gun policies are “downstream of culture” which explained the country’s gun death rates. 

The area defined as the Deep South by Woodard, one that comprises much of what is the south and  Northern Florida, had the highest gun death rate at 15.6 per 100,000 and the region of New Netherland, New York City, and the surrounding areas—had a rate of 3.8.