THE BOSTICK REPORT-The Washington Post recently released an article about two distinctly different communities; one that has a higher proportion of museums and libraries compared to gun stores and one that has a higher proportion of gun stores to museums and libraries. Both ratios were measured on the county level and based on a survey by the Pew Research Center that compiled the results nationwide.
The author for the Post compiled the data and generated two lists demonstrating the top 25 gun store counties and top 25 museum and library counties. By collating that data, the author found that New York County had the highest ratio of museums and libraries 41.55 for every gun store countywide whereas Deschutes County (in Oregon) had the most gun stores with 6.71 for every museum or library.
Looking at the list of the top 25 museum and library counties, the median ratio was 4.88 museums and libraries for every gun store. In the gun friendly county list, the median ratio was 4 gun stores for every museum or library. Geographically, the museum-library counties were overwhelmingly in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and California with one county in Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.
The geographic dispersion of the top 25 counties favoring gun stores was concentrated in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Texas with a smattering in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, and South Carolina.
I’ve had a long-standing curiosity with the exploration of what life is like in a community that embraces guns. My interest piqued by this dataset, I attempted to flesh out the insight by adding the following indices for each top 25 list: Murder Rate, Rape Rate, Education Attained, Home Values, Household Income and Home Ownership Rates, and finally, Poverty and Food Stamps Rates.
To get a clearer, fairer contrast, I simply found the incidence of each added criteria for each top 25 list and determined the median for the whole data set. For example, I found out the rape rates in each of the 25 counties favoring gun stores, then determined the median of those and used that number to compare the median of the same criteria for the top 25 counties favoring museums and libraries.
What I found was insightful and I bring up rape because it was the most visceral, tangible difference that leapt out at me when comparing the differences in quality of life in counties that preferred gun stores and counties that preferred museums and libraries.
Murder Rate
But let’s start with murder rates. Both demographic preferences have significantly less murder rates than the national average of 4.7 per 100,000 people, but the museum and library crowd beats the national rate by 56% while the gun crowd has a median murder rate of 3.07 per 100,000, still better than the US rate by 35%. It should be noted, though, that the gun communities might be safer than the overall national rate indicates, museum goers have a 33% lower murder rate than in a gun store community.
Rape Rate
As long as there is an incidence of rape, we have lost a major societal battle and should be ashamed. From that perspective, it’s hard to say that there is a victory on either side in studying the numbers for rape in either community because it still exists in both, albeit in far higher numbers in communities that prefer gun stores.
That’s why I say that if Pablo Picasso, famed lothario and 20th century master, remained amongst his own, steeped in artists and museums, he would be living in an area with a 35% lower incidence of rape than the national rate of 26.8 rapes per 100,000 people.
However, should Picasso choose to walk into a gun store, he would be entering into a danger zone where he is just a lot more likely to get raped than in the Louvre. Specifically, gun communities have a rape rate of 26.47 per 100,000.
To clarify, that means that in counties where there are more museums and libraries than gun stores, you experience 32% less incidence of rape. This is a huge difference in how people must live their lives and a factor that merits significant study.
In my opinion, rape is just about the worse crime, probably more so than murder. Just on a practical level, when you’re murdered, that’s it. Your loved ones are devastated and your life ends, but the fallout beyond that is pretty well contained. I don’t mean to say that a high rate of murder isn’t devastating to a community. Clearly, it is and the threat of murder is a pervasive deterrent from a healthy community. It’s one of the reasons why I am now certain that I want to live near museums.
But, rape is a victimization that is more viral, particularly within the person raped. It’s essentially taking someone and removing any semblance of power they might have felt over their ability to choose. It is a physical, emotional, and spiritual defeat that is both primal and complex in its ability to destroy a person’s sense of security.
Rape will dog you until the last breath you take with the knowledge that someone else can walk up to you and force you down. It is a crushing blow to your sense of self and the visceral memory of those moments will always remain just below the surface, ready to run through your mind and body at the slightest insinuation of its presence, be that a sight, sound, taste, thought, or touch that coursed through you during that one moment of violence.
Rape is an incredibly effective tool of domination and is used across the world in ethnic, religious, and political warfare because it doesn’t just show your physical power over someone else. It breaks their spirit and their will to fight. It is stronger than any missile or bullet.
So, when looking at the incidence of rape in communities that favors gun stores over museums and libraries, I find myself disgusted. I’m not shocked because I intuit that people who embrace guns over museums have an innate stronger connection to violence as evidenced by their fascination with an instrument of violence. But, I am concerned to see such a strong prevalence of rape.
Education
On high school graduation, both communities are better than the national rate of 85.7%, though with a high school graduation rate of 89.1%, those in the gun culture have a slight edge over the cognoscente of the arts and letters who have a graduation rate of 88.7%.
That minor competitive edge in educational attainment pretty much stops there, however, as median college graduation rates in weapons enclaves are 15% lower than the national average and a whopping 29% lower than the median rate within the museum and library crowd. It makes sense, but is striking nonetheless.
Home Values
The median home is valued at $181,400 in the United States. If you live in LA or New York, that number induces an instantaneous and uncontrollable jealousy. That’s because in metropolitan areas like New York, you are much more likely to encounter a museum than you are a gun store and thus, higher property values.
The trend of urbanization and higher rates of the arts is strong and one of the reasons that the median home value is $354,700 in communities that prefer museums and libraries to gun stores. Gun-leaning towns and communities tend to be less urban, though not enough to paint as stark a brush as saying gun lovers live on farms and museum-goers live in the city. That said, the median home value in gun communities is $164,200, nearly 10% less than the national median.
Home Ownership Rates and Household Income
You’d think that cheaper homes would translate into incredible gains in the rate of homeownership for gun lovers relative to homeownership rates in pricier, museum communities. And though the median number for gun store communities was better than the national rate of 65.5%, it was a mere 4 points higher. More curiously, the museum lovers are 2 percentage points lower than the gun crowd even with a median home value of more than twice that of the gun communities.
I can only guess that the higher college graduation rates for the book readers and art lovers is driving them towards careers and profession that pay more as their median income bests the national rate by 17.5% and the gun communities by 16.2%. That probably explains the relatively similar homeownership rates.
Poverty and Food Stamps
Surprisingly, the poverty rates for both communities are better than the national average. The median rates of poverty in museum communities is 20% better than the national rate while the gunslinger towns is 17.5% better than the national number.
I expected to see that the higher home values relative to median incomes within museum communities to create a need for more social welfare and the tendency for these communities to be more urban also creates a stereotypical expectation to find more poverty, but evidently not so much.
In fact, both the median average of the museum and the gun communities are far below the US average in collecting food stamps too, though the library/museum folk, again, are far better off than the gun folk. In museum and library communities, food stamp collection is 35% less than the national average while the pistol packers have a rate of receiving food stamps that is 15% lower than the national rate. Both good, but one clearly better.
Takeaways
Neither of these community types can be completely described through these data points. The goal here is to get a better idea of what life is like for each community. Clearly, the museum and library communities trend towards higher education levels that beget higher incomes and larger home values with a generally lower need for social welfare programs. You might also logically point out that areas with higher concentrations of museums typically have priced out the poverty and pushed it to corners of the community.
However, recall that these statistics are done on the county level, so those corners of poverty are included. By operating from that wider range of a county, we get a much clearer idea of how life is in each type of community. It is a much better approach than simply looking at this by population density.
All that said, the one thing that stood out to me, obviously, was the incidence of rape. So, if Picasso walked into a gun store community, he would be much more likely to be raped than if he were to walk into a museum community. He is less likely to be murdered than the national average, but he would even less likely to be murdered if he stayed home.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 51
Pub: June 24, 2014
