despite conservatives’ dog-whistles about crime rates in Democrat-controlled “urban areas,” predominantly white rural areas experience astronomical rates of violent crime. Even with large “Blue” cities removed, the gap in violent crime between Red and Blue states persisted. The top 20 counties, for rates of gun violence, are all in the rural South.

States of the former Confederacy have a high rate of violent crime going back to the 19th century, in large part because of cultural values inculcated in the white population. As Jeff Asher, Ben Horwitz and Toni Monkovic write,

A New York Times article in 1998 pointed to “a divergence that has persisted for as long as records have been kept” in which “the former slaveholding states of the old Confederacy all rank in the top 20 states for murder, led by Louisiana, with a rate of 17.5 murders per 100,000 people in 1996.”

A study of judicial records from 1800 to 1860 found that the murder rate in South Carolina was four times higher than in Massachusetts. More than a century later, in 1996, the ratio was similar. And in 2018, the murder rate was 7.7 per 100,000 in South Carolina and 2.0 in Massachusetts — again, about four times higher.

In the 1800s, the South tended to have more “frontier justice,” in which people took the law into their own hands, as well as more “honor justice,” in which signs of disrespect could advance to fatal encounters like duels.

The combination of Second Great Awakening religion, an environment of settlers and slave patrols, and the Scots-Irish “culture of honor” have, between them, left a toxic legacy. I know it’s hard to believe that glowering white men in Oakleys, with Punisher and Molon Labe stickers plastered on the back windows of their oversize penis-substitute pickups, might be disproportionately prone to senseless, irrational violence — but here we are.

Kevin Carson • Konstantin Kisin’s Delusions Are On Life Support