By Douglas V. Gibbs; Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
A conversation with a left-leaning, Democrat Party voting, friend revealed how foolish these people can be. His family wants to take a vacation in Florida to see Miami’s beaches, Walt Disney World, and other sights that are unique to the Panhandle State located on the far southeast corner of the United States. My friend, however, has been refusing to give in because of how dangerous he believes Florida to be. “The relaxed gun laws makes that State very dangerous. There’s too many guns, and I hear gun violence and the murder rate in Florida is sky-high.”
I told him that was not true, and if anything, a high percentage of gun ownership by law-abiding citizens makes a State safer, not more dangerous.
In an interview Hillary Clinton helped feed the false narrative; “If you look at real crime statistics, which they’re not interested in examining, the states with the highest crime levels are states run by Republicans. That’s just a fact.”
If one uses Google and simply asks for a list of the States with the highest crime rates, the lists do indeed show that in the top ten most of the States are those one would consider “red states”.
The statistics, however, are misleading. The red states do not have higher crime rates and homicide rates because they are conservative, but because the Democrat run cities in those States dominate the statistics. In other words, the high crime rates in Republican States is due to the high crime in Democrat cities and counties. According to Pamela Geller’s access to a Heritage Foundation study, murder rates are 60 percent higher in Democrat-run counties compared to those led by Republicans.
The study reveals the truth about the false talking points by lefties that red states have the highest homicide numbers.
Using state-level data for homicides is misleading because crimes are prosecuted at the local level.
Rural areas represent a smaller percentage of the population so more often than not, the statistics are going to be based on what goes on in the big cities of those States, and typically big cities are dominated by Democrat-voting residents and progressive-minded politicians.
As Portland, Oregon has gone from liberal left to extreme Antifa leftwing crazy, the crime has increased dramatically. Democrats have worked to defund the police, reduce sentences for violent crimes including murder, have worked to put in place unarmed policing policies with yoga meditation added to help the criminals reach a happy-happy-joy-joy mental state, sought to end the use of K-9 Units, eliminated bail in many cases, reduced penalties for shoplifting and has made reporting such crimes a no-no, some politicians have even called for putting an end to prison sentences and in places like California a horde of prisoners have been released early over and over, and the big city Democrats have put into place other failed reform polies and the result has been more crime across the board.
Cities, Counties, and other local regions following Democrat policies are the places where crime and murder on on the upswing, and in many cases the Democrat policies in Democrat-run cities have elevated red-states that are otherwise places that enjoy low crime rates a statistical nightmare when one looks at the whole thing from a statewide perspective.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary