It’s well established that certain offenders remain disproportionately responsible for violent crime. A 2001 report on such “chronic offenders” in Minnesota concluded that over a four-year period, just five percent of offenders were responsible for 19 percent of the criminal convictions in the state, including 37 percent of all felonies. Compared with non-chronic offenders, these chronic offenders had eleven times more homicide convictions, 15 times more robbery convictions, five times more assault convictions, and 21 times more convictions for kidnapping.
In the same way that a small number of persistent offenders have an oversized impact on violent crime, specific locations are also heavily overrepresented on crime maps. Research by Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows that murders, and gun murders specifically, tend to be “extremely concentrated” within certain counties. Those counties, unsurprisingly, tend to reflect the soft-on-crime, anti-gun politics that prevail in the Democrat Party.
The CPRC’s July 26 paper, Murders in US Remain Very Concentrated in 2024, with the Murders in Worst 2% of Counties Remaining at their 2020 Peaks, examined the geography of murders overall and finds that generally, there are three types of counties in America. Most have no murders at all; a smaller set has a few murders, and then there is “a tiny set of counties where murders are very common:”
The worst 1% of counties (the worst 31 counties) have 20% of the population and 41% of the murders. The worst 2% of counties (63 counties) contain 30% of the population and 54% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 46% of the population and account for 71% of murders. But even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas within those counties. By contrast, 53% of the counties have zero murders and another 16% have just one murder. These 69% of the counties account for only 3% of all murders in the country.
This concentration of murders by specific areas also tends to hold true over time and despite changes in the county’s share of the population. The most dangerous 5% of the counties accounted for 71% of the murders in 2010, which varied between 69% and 73% in the intervening years and settled back at 71% by 2024. A similar pattern occurred in the worst 1% of counties over time.
In research described in an article this month, the CPRC also determined that the worst 2% of U.S. counties were responsible for an even greater share of firearm murders than murders overall, accounting for 53% of all murders but 57% of firearm murders in 2025. The “worst 2% to 5% of counties account for a share of firearm murders about four percentage points larger than their share of all murders,” and the worst one percent of counties tallied up an astonishing 43% of all gun-related murders. (On the flip side, 78% of counties recorded zero or only one firearm-related murder last year.)
With respect to gun control politics specifically, it’s notable most violent areas are, according to the CPRC, also the most reliable Democratic strongholds in the country.
Joe Biden, America’s most virulently anti-Second Amendment president, “carried all but one of these counties in 2020. Trump carried the lone exception by just 1.1 percentage points. Even in the more Republican 2024 election, Harris carried 25 of these 31 counties. Trump carried the other six by an average of only four percentage points.” The CPRC breakdown of the political leanings for the worst 1% of the counties for murders overall reveals that Democrat presidential candidates have won in these locations by at least ten percentage points and, in many cases, by a far greater margin. Moreover, murders in these worst 1% counties “overwhelmingly occur in their major cities” – most of which have “elected Democrats as mayors and either had a strong Democrat majority or Democrat-leaning control of the city councils.”
These are the candidates and politicians most likely to support and impose measures that exacerbate violent crime, like soft-on-crime reforms (no-bail pretrial release, diversion programs and eliminating mandatory minimum sentences) and gun control prohibitions that disarm only the law-abiding.
In Los Angeles, California, which tops the list of the one-percenters, the county’s “Office of Violence Prevention” outlined a 40-point “gun violence prevention plan” that calls for advocating for “robust gun safety legislation” locally and nationally, to include universal background checks, requiring gun owners to register with the government, supporting legislation to ban “assault weapons, large capacity magazines and ghost guns,” restricting permits to purchase and to carry to those over the age of 21, enacting “gun industry accountability laws” to hold the industry liable and strengthen “oversight” over gun marketing, improving the enforcement of “red flag” laws, and supporting federal legislation to bring guns within the scope of consumer protection statutes. Of course, this chimes with the agenda of California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who, since 2019, has signed “more than 80 gun-related measures and pil[ed] new taxes, mandates, and restrictions onto an already hostile landscape for the Second Amendment.”
That is the formula. Not focusing on strategic “criminal control” and crime hotspots, but more gun control.
Anti-gun advocates now hope to usher in the same program in other states following the elections in November. The Trace, Michel Bloomberg’s gun control “newsroom,” writes that “Gun safety advocates believe a Democratic takeover [in Pennsylvania] will lead to legislative reforms they’ve sought for years,” with priorities being universal background checks, a “red flag” law, and a ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of homemade firearms. If Democrats prevail in the midterms, a Pennsylvania Democrat predicts “we’ll be able to have a real conversation about gun control.”
We’re not holding our breath, but any real and honest conversation about gun control should start with how little it’s done to keep America’s dangerous “murder counties” safe.
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