[oatmeal1]

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).

[CapstanRoller]

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.

[dffdsa432]

The most violent cities in America are all blue cities.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-viol...

[mikeryan]

Shit. Your own source disproves that if you use the most recent data

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-dang...

Take off the minimum population requirement of 100k residents and the most dangerous metro areas are all small, rural conservative towns. https://www.statista.com/statistics/433603/us-metropolitan-a...

[alephnerd]

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

[CapstanRoller]

>muh red cities

>muh blue cities

>deflecting from the larger point and arguing about team colors

It's all so tiresome.

[Incipient]

It's not only tiresome, it's unproductive. Why it's the case is probably for a whole host of reasons - generally poor education, media, cultural.

[theironhammer]

And most of that is done by drug dealers fighting over turf. The shootings are highly concentrated in certain geographic areas.

[m0ped]

Most cities are blue cities

[red-iron-pine]

Virtually all large cities in the US are blue, even in otherwise rabidly red states.

[bombcar]

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.

[theironhammer]

Perhaps you should have a look at this book. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/william-kleinknec...

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.

Just for starters.

[alephnerd]

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.

US State HDIs - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

European HDIs - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_...

[theironhammer]

Fair enough. From the link, I see that the states with the lowest HDIs are Red States while the highest HDIs are mostly all Blue States.

[alephnerd]

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.

[dumbotron]

> 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.

[zbrozek]

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.

[dumbotron]

I'm not being smug about CA's grid. It has rolling blackout on hot days. Its problem is it doesn't let anyone build power plants.

[zbrozek]

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.

[theironhammer]

Is SFBA's power private? Is LA's power still publicly owned? Do they have power outages (ie Brownouts etc)?

[zbrozek]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[robotresearcher]

Wyoming and Montana have the two highest gun ownership rates of US states, and the two highest suicide rates. It’s probably not a coincidence.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/...

[benburleson]

Texas sure seems to be an outlier though.

[TexanFeller]

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.

[theironhammer]

Don't mess with Texas. It's already a mess.

[buzzert]

Utah as well. Arizona also has a much higher standard of living than California.