MURDER ZONES

By Mark Chesnut. Apr 24, 2023

In the movie Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) shoots Maj. Strasser to stop him from preventing Victor and Ilsa’s airplane from taking off, Capt. Louis Renault gave officers arriving on the scene their marching orders when he delivered the now-famous line: “Round up the usual suspects.”

While rounding up the “usual suspects” isn’t exactly a common or practical policing technique, a decade ago, a high-level law-enforcement official told me that if he could just go into a handful of specific areas in his city and arrest 200 known bad guys, murders in his city would drop to nearly zero. I recall being somewhat skeptical of that claim at the time, but I didn’t have any research to dispute it.

The thing is, the more we learn about murder in America, the more his observation concerning the localized nature of homicides rings true. And a recent study reiterating that point should cause those in policymaking roles to consider ways of reducing murders other than their usual method of blaming guns and gun owners.

Our Murderous Zip Codes

New research from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows, once again, what most of us have known all along: When it comes to murder in America, the country’s millions of lawful gun owners are not the problem.

The research paper by John Lott, founder and president of the CPRC, titled “Murders in U.S. Are Very Concentrated, and They Are Becoming Even More So,” revealed that 2% of American counties experienced 56% of murders in 2020, showing that increasing murder rates are very localized in identifiable hotspots. .....