8 of 10 most violent states in america are - you guessed it - red

[baldguy]

113. Those who believe absurdities will allow atrocities occur.

Your premise requires that the idea of large numbers of people being inherently more evil than small numbers of people, simply because their numbers are larger. That's your first absurdity.

Let's look at your hypothetical town of 34 with 1 murder each year. Forget about murder - that's a death rate that leads to extinction of a population within a generation. You seem to be perfectly OK with that. You don't think that's worse than the 435 Chicago had in 2010? In your town, everyone knows one another. Everyone is probably related one way or another. All the murders are possibly related, and the law in that town probably knows who's guilty and - either intentionally or through incompetence - allows the murderers to go free. And finally it means that the murders may be covering up some other, greater crimes.

Every person in your town lives in constant fear. That's not a problem? Police corruption isn't a problem?

Tragic though they may be, 435 murders out of a population of 2.5 million people isn't unusual. Such a rate will not lead to extinction, it's not evidence of massive police corruption, and the people do not live in constant fear.

However, there are quite a few things we can still do to reduce the number of murders. One of which is to get rid of the guns.