The Influence of Geography on Gun Culture

Of all the reprehensible shootings we’ve had in the country in recent weeks and the 180+ mass shootings in the first 121 days of the year, the one in Cleveland, Texas seems the worst, and not just because Gov. Greg “Hold My Beer, Ron” Abbott described the dead as “illegal” immigrants with an alleged smirk.

You’ll remember that that is the one — like mass shootings are a freaking Friends episode, now — in which a friendly Texas neighbor was shooting his AR-15 at 11:00 PM at night in his front yard, as one does, and took exception to the now dead family’s dad asking him to stop or move further away because it was keeping their baby awake. Would that that baby had stayed in the womb, so Greg Abbott could care about its life! He responded by shooting dead five of the people in the house including a nine year old… as one does, apparently, in the United Fucking States of Fucking Stupid.

Yeah, that one seems worse to me than all the other heinous shootings we’ve been traumatized by this year alone, but go ahead, debate the point in the comments, please.

Culture and Gun Violence

The huge number of gun-related deaths in the US buggers the question of why we have a culture that will tolerate this level of slaughter and trauma? Don’t give me nothing ’bout no poll numbers. The only poll that counts is at the ballot box. And, that actually tells us something. Gun violence is not evenly distributed across this blood-red land of ours. Some of us are flooding our hip waders in blood and some of us are just sloshing around in blood up to our ankles. Why is there such a huge disparity? Can psychology explain it?

It seems to me counter-intuitive to say that culture is tied to geography. Culture is a human construct that we use to explain differences in behavior, language, beliefs, dress, and all sorts of things between people that are otherwise pretty much the same. Yet, there is ample evidence that geography influences culture.

Specifically, geography has been found to correlate closely with the number of gun related deaths in an area and the amount of racism, as reported in Racism in America: Same Bat Time, Same Bat Place — Location Influences Bias. Let’s take a deeper dive into culture, then explore the data linking gun deaths to geography, and if there are words left in the self-imposed limits, we’ll revisit some of the racism and culture stuff, too.

Deep Culture

As explained in the post, The Civil War Never Ended: The Racist Deep Culture of Trumpism (part 1), Deep culture is “the unconscious frameworks of meaning, values, norms and hidden assumptions that we use to interpret our experience.” 

As such, deep culture is what governs how similarly two or more people view a scene. You know like if you see a Black teenager in a hoodie walking away from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and a drink, do you see a kid walking with a drink and candy or are you mortified to your core fearing for your life? You know like if you see someone pull into your driveway and then start to pull out again, are you so afeared for your life that you start shooting into the car as they flee or do you think someone is lost or unsure of where they are and are just turning around? Deep culture governs how you view those two situations.

Culture is passed from person to person like syphilis or pregnancy. Consequently, we’ve always thought that deep culture changed slowly, generation to generation. However, what happens when immigrants or migrants move to an area with their culture? The culture of the migrant is a minority culture. The individual must somehow integrate the majority culture of their new area into themselves and into their already existing deep culture. The newcomer’s culture changes.

Theoretically, it is possible that the newcomers will change the local culture, but given the evidence from the Harvard Implicit Bias study and a study by the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Colin Woodard, it doesn’t seem like it is an even exchange or maybe it’s no exchange at all.

Geography, Culture, and Gun Violence

In the US, where are you more likely to die a violent gun death by your own hand (suicide), a stranger (murder), or someone known to you (murder)? New York City? Atlanta? Chicago? New Orleans? the West Virginia coal country? Nebraska corn fields? Texas? Florida? California?

According Woodard’s research, the places with the most gun deaths is the Deep South, especially in the greater New Orleans area. Is that what you thought? Look at the area labeled New Netherlands (New York City), it is among the safest. Florida, the Deep South, the rest of the old Confederacy, border states, much of Texas, and Oklahoma, are far and away the most dangerous places in the country. And, what do the politicians from those states tell you: it’s New York City and Chicago that are dangerous, that you’ve got to be armed to defend yourself from the deep state and all the criminals.

Join me in a chorus of That’s FUCKING insane!

Now just wait, a minute my favorite drunk uncle slurs spewing his gin and whiskey steeped breath and spittle across us says. Jus’ what the heck kinda proof of anything is a map that labels New York City as the New Netherlands, New Orleans as the New South, Hawaii as Greater Polynesia? What the fuck is up with that shit right there?

Cultural Roots of the US

Glad you asked. Woodard has studied the sources of colonists and settlers for the US, especially in the east and south east of the country (these folks migrated west as the country expanded). He has found distinct cultural boundaries in the country and has labelled with names indicating their affiliation with either the origins of the predominate culture of the settlers there or of where they are in the US, so New Netherlands for New York City because it was originally a Dutch colony, New France for New Orleans because it was originally a French colony.

He gives us some key differences for the cultures of each area:

YANKEEDOM: This was Puritan country where if you didn’t love Jesus right, you could be banished to the wilderness to establish Rhodes Island, but they also wanted to build heaven on Earth because God’s chosen. On the plus side, they favored the common good over individualism (thus all the banishing) and accepted foreigners as long as they loved Jesus right.

Because small individual farms were the predominate economic organizing principle, these folks were interdependent. They needed to help each other do the more difficult and labor intensive farming and community activities. Think barn raising and that kind of stuff. This is traditional Americana of neighbor helping neighbor.

NEW NETHERLAND (sic): This is the former Dutch colony; surprisingly, it still exhibits many of the ideals of 17th-century Dutch culture: global trade, materialism, and a real tolerance for differences.

You don’t run a city without having food and natural resources for it. Those came from the surrounding countryside,, which New York has long since consumed, but its culture remains. That culture is very similar to that of Yankeedom.

GREATER APPALACHIA: Most people don’t know the history of Appalachia, but it was populated by folks from the English rejects from its own isles: Northern Ireland, Northern England, and Scottish lowlands. All of these folks valued individualism and were anti-authority, especially British monarchy authority (the original deep state).

The British castoffs were herding folk. The herding economy differs from farming because livestock is so much more vulnerable and easy to steal. Herdsman have to be vigilant and distrustful. Given the fluidity of the basis of wealth where possession really is nine-tenths of the law, these folks weren’t always the most obedient and submissive to authority and the law.

DEEP SOUTH: I didn’t know this, but apparently when the British Caribbean colonies needed some place to send its burgeoning slave owning population, it sent them to the Deep South. They brought their view of democracy as being for the people-owning class and the idea that their was a natural hierarchy with Black folks at the bottom and them at the top. Convenient, right?

A lot of the settlers here were the second sons who had little to bring with them from the family estate other than their culture. They were the landed gentry, which means that they brought with them a sense of chivalry straight from Medieval knights in shining armor and feudal ideas of social organization and hierarchy and their rights of ownership, entitlement, and honor.

Cultural Legacy

These are the people who populated the earliest forms of government, businesses, and institutions of the country. As such they made the “rules” by which the day-to-day operation of these organizations ran. They wrote the newspapers and became the clergy. They disseminated information to the population. They trained their successors and the people who joined, like employees, students, and members.

As interregional migration occurred, the institutional culture endured. It was the way that things were done there. Newcomers were assimilated into it, changing the newcomers much more than the newcomers changed it.

Now, jus’ wait a ding-dang-dumb minute! my favorite drunk uncle pipes up. Culture cannot be tied to geography cuz we’d all be living like Native Americans!

Good point, but culture is passed person-to-person. Remove the people who have the culture, they cannot pass it on to anther. We did not assimilate the Native Americans, we genocided them and those who didn’t do the right thing and die, we moved on to reservations hoping they’d die there. That’s not what happened throughout much of American history to the white people who settled the country and those of us who continue to migrate around it.

Now we have the Second Amendment gun culture being disseminate whole sale around the country. It is being passed form person to person. It is wildly supported and used by those living in the honor cultures of the American South, but it is breaking out and being passed on to others around the country.

Image Attribution

Image generated by WordPress’ AI image maker using the phrase, cartoon map of the US with each state drawn as a caricature of a gun. It is licensed however WordPress licensing these things, so use it at your own risk. I just trust that it is okay for me to use it.