Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center, Salve Regina University: America’s regions are poles apart when it comes to gun deaths and the cultural and ideological forces that drive them. By Colin Woodard: “Whenever you happen to read this article a chilling mass shooting has probably been in U.S. headlines recently. When I started writing this post it was the murder of three nine-year olds, their principal, teacher and custodian at a small Christian school in a comfortable Nashville neighborhood by a former student with an AR-15 rifle; by the time I finished five were killed at a Louisville, Kentucky bank, including a close friend of that state’s governor; 32 had been shot – four fatally — at a Zumba studio in rural Alabama where a 16-year old girl was celebrating her birthday; teenagers had been shot for accidentally ringing the wrong door bell in Kansas City and approaching the wrong car after cheerleading practice in suburban Texas and a 20-year old woman killed after turning into the wrong driveway in rural Hebron, New York; and a young man executed his parents and two family friends in rural Maine and then shot two random people on a stretch of highway I drive regularly because he thought they were pursuing him. There’s the numbing certainty that someone somewhere soon will enter a shopping mall, concert venue, restaurant, lawn party, university campus or another school and start shooting people. It can – it has – happened just about everywhere: places rich and poor, in big cities, leafy suburbs, and tiny towns, in schools in Newtown, Connecticut, and Columbine, Colorado, and Parkland, Florida, in the shadow of a Las Vegas skyscraper and the altar of a Charleston church and the steps of a Chicagoland synagogue.

It’s not just mass shootings. Our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence, much of it committed with firearms. Our death rate from assault is many times higher than that of highly urbanized countries like the Netherlands or Germany, sparsely populated nations with plenty of forests and game hunters like Sweden, Finland or New Zealand, and large, populous ones like the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. There’s state-sponsored violence, too: last year we executed 11 times as many prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined, which is less surprising when you realize that Japan is the only other such country that allows the practice. Our gun homicide rate is nearly ten times that of Canada…”