Friday 20 May 2022 08:40 PM Nationwide spike in homicide rates was WORSE in Democrat-leaning areas; no link ... trends now
The double-digit rise in murders at the start of the coronavirus pandemic was felt more sharply in Democrat-leaning counties and had little or nothing to do with gun sales in those areas, new analysis reveals.
A study by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank, sheds new light on the 30 per cent surge in murders between 2019 and 2020 that accompanied Covid-19 and a wave of protests over the death of George Floyd.
Analysts typically account for the rise in homicides to the social upheaval from pandemic lockdowns and the collapse in police-community ties over Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis in May 2020. Some say it was a red state phenomena.
But the analysis released this week by Christos Makridis and Robert VerBruggen points elsewhere, bolstering champions of law and order and undermining calls from campaigners to ‘defund the police’ and restrict gun ownership.
Many analysts attribute the rise in homicides to the social upheaval from pandemic lockdowns and the collapse in police-community ties
When analyzing the data county by county, Makridis says that Republican leaning areas fared better against the 2020 murder surge than others
Their study of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources, which covered 290 urban counties home to 58 per cent of the US population, found Republican-leaning areas fared better against the homicide surge than others.
‘We find some evidence that suggests that the nation’s political cultures played a role, with homicide increases in GOP-leaning counties tending to be smaller than those in Democratic-leaning counties,’
