What Fox News Won't Say: Murder Rates Are Higher In Republican States Than Democratic Ones

[appalachiablue]

- A volunteer at a church- run, gun buyback program in Dallas, Texas logs in the serial no. of an unloaded pistol, 2013.
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- Daily Kos, April 5, 2022. - Ed.

A new study* again confirms it: Republican-led states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones. While your Tucker Carlson-watching uncle may be utterly convinced that Portland, Oregon, has been burned to the ground, or regaling his email lists with any number of tales he heard directly from Trump's inflamed appendix, the truth of the matter is that the states with high violent crime rates tend to be led by conservative Republican politicians. So then, which causes which? That's not clear, but the Yahoo! News writeup of the study provides a nice, terse summary of what we know does predict violent crime rates. They "are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance," which not coincidentally describes much of the deep-conservative South.

It may be that fear of violent crime makes Americans more conservative; certainly, anyone with a passing familiarity with Fox News knows that America's top conservative news source got that way with hosts that scream in bug-eyed terror over all the ways that you, personally, are in imminent danger of being murdered by immigrants, or bilingual people, or the Socialisms, or anyone who thinks American police are straight-up murdering too many of the people they come in contact with these days. It's also the precise fear that made the National Rifle Association what it is today. ‘Violent crime is coming for you; you'd better buy 10 guns and stuff your closet with ammo so that you can heroically save the day by being violent at everybody else first!’ That's been the steady refrain in every magazine and speech and podcast, all of it sponsored by the murder—ahem, "safety"—industry.

But the reality remains: If you want to reduce violent crime, you fix up the schools to raise education levels, you institute programs to lift people out of poverty, and you provide government assistance to make sure people are at least getting food and a roof over their heads. Since all of these are things that Republicanism is absolutely bug-eyed dead-set against in any form, in any venue, we're hardly going out on a limb by saying A leads to B leads to C. Republican governance leads to lower education and higher poverty rates; lower education and higher poverty leads to violent crime; therefore, voting for Republicans causes higher murder rates. There ya go, there's your bumper sticker pitch. Stop voting for Republicanism if you want to not be murdered, America. Hmm. And yet, that's not something you really hear on not-conservative television shows. You don't see CNN shows with liberal hosts screaming that GOP lawmakers are coming to your town, to your street, and with them comes MURDER.

It may be that non-conservative Americans are simply less motivated by such paranoias, at a gut level, and so the Fox News approach to creating an endless wave of enemies won't work on anyone not predisposed to such panic. This study is not likely to convince any of the people that need convincing; conservatives have long insisted that we need to gut social programs, including our schools, because regardless of the actual outcomes of doing that it is simply not "fair" for Americans to pay taxes for those things. It is better, in conservatism, to increase poverty & cause higher rates of violence than it is to decrease poverty through government action; the resulting high crime rates can then be dealt with by convincing Americans to buy guns to protect themselves from the new criminals...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/4/5/2090239/-What-Fox-News-won-t-say-Murder-rates-are-higher-in-Republican-states-than-Democratic-ones

- * 'Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones: study,' Yahoo News, April 4, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/republican-controlled-states-have-higher-murder-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-212137750.html

[Lovie777]

1. And yet Republicans are claiming that Blue States have the highest . ....

These people rarely tell the truth.

[appalachiablue]

2. Tragically people believe the lies due to low educ., racism, more..

[Blue Owl]

3. Murder rates, poverty rates, domestic abuse rates, low education rates, worst health care, etc. etc.

You'll find all this and more in America's red states!