12/17/2025
Roughly 63 counties, about 2 percent of the country, account for over half of all murders in the U.S.
Just 5 percent of counties account for roughly 75 percent.
Within those counties, violence is often relegated to urban areas, sometimes confined to just a few city blocks. It is an extraordinarily narrow problem and is driven almost entirely by gang violence.
At the same time, about 52 percent of U.S. counties typically record zero murders, many of them with very high rates of gun ownership.
Remove these issue areas from the stats, or better yet actually solve the problems there, and the US becomes as safe as most European countries.
It's not the guns.
