There is a certain ritual to lighting up a fine cigar. You take your time, clip the cap, toast the foot with some good fire, and then you let the smoke settle before drawing out the complex flavors beneath the wrapper. It requires patience, nuance, and a willingness to look past the superficial outer leaf to understand what you are actually holding.
When it comes to the discussion surrounding crime, violence, and self-defense in America, however, we just don’t give the subject the same level of thinking and inspection. Instead, media outlets and policymakers hand us a narrative: it’s all about bad guns (especially the semi-automatic rifles that look scary), whine about an imagined “wild west,” and call for gun and magazine bans. Because criminals will obey that law.
In this article, I’m going to slow down, settle into the leather chair, and unpack a few things beyond “the narrative”. To truly understand security and violence in the United States, you have to evaluate it based on culture, history, size, and scope rather than narratives. We’re going to look at the reality of the scale of the USA, urban vs. suburban and rural settings, and the reality of what a country with 500 million guns actually means for crime, violence and self-defense.
The Scale Illusion: Why 340 Million People Defy Simple Comparisons
To understand America, you first have to grasp its sheer magnitude. The United States is not a homogeneous nation-state the size of a European province; it is a continental superpower of roughly 340 million souls, boasting vast cultural, historical, and regional diversity.
Let’s contrast that with Germany, which is the most populous nation in the EU and almost the highest population density. Germany is #2 on that front and the UK takes #1 on population density. Germany covers roughly 138,000 square miles, which is about 15% larger than the state of Colorado, or almost exactly the same size as Montana. Germany, however, as about 84 million people. When you look at specific regional footprints, the contrast gets interesting. For example, the Munich city area and the Denver city area share a very similar physical size: 120 square miles for Munich and 150 square miles for Denver. However, Munich’s population is 1.5 million and Denver’s is about 740 thousand. The ethnic and cultural diversity of Denver is significantly greater than Munich, as well. What this means is that comparing the United States, a massive country about the size of the entire European continent, spanning multiple time zones, with many waves of external and internal migration in a very short period of time, to a single European nation is a fundamental statistical fallacy.
When foreign observers or domestic critics look at aggregate national crime statistics in the U.S., they completely ignore this mosaic nature. You cannot paint a 340-million-person republic with a single broad brush.
Geography Dictates Reality: The Urban Concentration of Homicide
When you strip away the national averages and look at where violence actually happens, a stark geographic reality emerges: the vast majority of violent crime, especially homicide, is hyper-concentrated in large urban settings and select surrounding suburbs. This is why we see a thug type young man trying to rob another man at gunpoint at a gas station in this article I just wrote, but it’s almost never going to happen in my small town and thousands like it across America.
America’s crime problem is not evenly distributed. Broad swaths of rural America, suburban neighborhoods, and smaller towns experience homicide rates comparable to, or even lower than, many peaceful Western European nations. For example, my small town of Maple Valley, WA has a murder rate in 2024 of less than 3 per 100,000 people, which is basically 1 murder per year. Germany’s murder rate in 2024 was 1 per 100,000 people. Since some years in Maple Valley have no murders, essentially our murder rate and violent crime rate is like Germany’s.
However, Seattle, just 40 miles away from me, has a murder rate of 6.8 per 100,000 people. Dramatically different. And the violent crime is heavily localized within specific urban pockets in the city. In the large urban setting, the violent crime and murder rates are driven less by mere economic scarcity and more by entrenched, generational behaviors and cultural norms that reject accountability and actively resist positive change. This is similar, actually, to the observation we can make about military recruiting patterns, which reveal a disproportionate share of service members emerge from specific cultural traditions and regions.
Treating a localized urban crisis as a nationwide cultural failure of the entire population is dishonest and counterproductive. Policies designed to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens in quiet rural or suburban communities do nothing to address the specific, localized behavioral and socio-economic drivers of crime in high-density urban corridors. And, in fact, how will those policies reduce violent crime when the focus on a thing (a firearm) and not on the person and the behavior. Does anyone think that making it harder, or impossible, to buy a $1000 semi-automatic rifle after passing a background check will do anything about a criminal with a stolen pistol?
The Unsung Hero: The Reality of Defensive Gun Use
Any honest conversation about American security must also acknowledge what happens when crime actually knocks on the door. While critics hyper-focus on criminal misuse, they routinely ignore the immense, quantifiable impact of Defensive Gun Use (DGU).
Study after study, including research historically supported by agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests that defensive gun uses happen hundreds of thousands and as much as several million times a year in the United States. The vast majority of these defensive encounters don’t even involve firing a shot; simply presenting a firearm is enough to deter a predator, halt an assault, or prevent a home invasion. I have a friend who stopped two thugs trying to rob him in a store parking lot. He happens to be about 70 years old, heavy set, white beard, looks like Santa Claus. He also carries a concealed firearm. I’m sure he looked like an easy target to the two 20’ish year old thugs that were trying to rob him. Right until he shoved his shopping cart into them, drew his pistol from concealment and told them to leave. Which they promptly did.
This is a crime that didn’t happen. In fact, there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of crimes that just don’t happen because someone like my friend produces a firearm and stops the crime. The violent crime rate in this country is actually lower by quite a bit because of this. These non-existent crimes represent injuries prevented, families protected, and lives saved quietly every single day. And all of this is completely absent from the evening news cycle. To discuss American firearm ownership purely through the lens of tragedy while entirely erasing millions of peaceful defensive preventions is a gross distortion of reality.
Deeper Than the Wrapper
Lighting a great cigar teaches you that surface-level judgments will always lead you astray. The American security landscape is no different.
If we want to build safer communities, we must abandon lazy, politically motivated talking points that blame the Second Amendment for complex sociological realities. We must look at the true geography of crime, respect the massive scale and diversity of a 340-million-person republic, and recognize that for millions of Americans, the right to keep and bear arms is an active shield against harm.
Pull up a chair, light up, and let’s start having the real conversation.
Further Reading
Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center
Observations from the Late Republic
#Observations #LateRepublic
There's an oft-repeated stat that a gun in the home is more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder.
What this ignores is the following:
1) About 2/3 of shootings are suicides, which is, to put it lightly, distinctly different than homicide and requires a distinctly different approach as a result. If you have mental issues then you don't need to keep a gun.
2) The number of defensive gun uses that don't involve firing a shot is about 97%. Most of the time the bad guy doesn't expect that and turns tail and runs, often after soiling his pants. Good people don't like hurting or killing people! Even if they have justification to do so.
Excellent article, Eric. Thanks. What's up with Boughie? Jonesing for a taste.