Because I have weird hobbies, I've spent a lot of time studying crime rates, particularly homicide, around the US. I'm very familiar with homicide rates and what drives them. (Hint: It isn't the guns.)

As a general statement, cities have much higher homicide rates than the suburbs, exurbs and rural areas.

If you zoom out too far, then the violent cities blend in with the less violent suburbs. For example, from the article you linked:

"From a county-based per capita county perspective, however, Cook County, Illinois had a lower homicide rate than many other counties in the United States. Between 2009 and 2015 there were 11 murders per 100,000 residents in Cook County."

That is about half of what the homicide rate was in the city of Chicago (the seat of Cook Co), so you can see that distortion when you're comparing counties rather than cities.

And since Chicago is in the news so often, let's use that as an anecdote: Chicago's homicide rate is more than 4x the national average, but it's _less than half_ of cities like Baltimore, Detroit, St Louis, New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

As a counter-example, NYC has a lower homicide rate than the US overall. This is awesome and a welcome change from the violence we saw in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. But NYC is also five counties, so you can see some real swings in crime rates from New York County to Bronx County, from Kings County to Richmond County, all in the same city.

Chicago's homicide rate is also very unevenly distributed, with about a half dozen or so neighborhoods accounting for the majority of homicides. This is true in many cities, which is why we want to zoom in rather than zoom out.

Are there violent rural areas? Of course. But I would be careful looking at rural, sparsely populated counties as counter-examples: the link you gave cited Coahoma Co, MS as number 2, with 37 homicides per 100k (7 times the then national rate but less than Baltimore etc.), however, Coahoma Co had a population of only 25k, which means there were about 9 homicides that year. Nine. Sure, the _rate_ is high but that could be skewed a single (awful) family murder-suicide.

> Most big US cities aren't remarkably-horrible dens of crime—not relative to small cities and rural counties, anyway, and not when looking at the per-capita rate and including those lower-pop areas.

First, your link didn't compare cities, it compared counties -- and it's easy for a low-pop county to skew statistics in a single year.

Second, I never claimed "horrible dens of crime", I claimed cities had higher violent crime rates than rural areas. Some cities are wonderfully safe. Some parts of Chicago are wonderfully safe. As a general statement, cities are more violent than rural areas.

Third, my main point was that it isn't the guns, it's who has the guns.

> The safer half or so of large US cities are safer than large swaths of rural and small-town/city America.

By population or square-miles? Coahoma Co may have had a homicide rate 7 times the national average, but it had the same number of murders in a year that Baton Rouge had in a month. That New Orleans had in two weeks. That St Louis had in two weeks. That Detroit had in a week and a half. That Baltimore had in a week. That Chicago had in a week.

We've got a problem with violence in the US. It isn't the guns.