The nearest town to me is Tremonton, Utah. It is a truly terrifying place… filled with country folk, ranchers, farmers, Republicans, conservatives. I’ve more than once seen the mind-snappingly frightening scene of a rancher come into one of the local restaurants or grocery or auto parts stores with a pistol on his hip, in plain view of everybody. Where even *children* can see those murderous murder machines, ready to mow down everyone in the establishment. Clearly, this preponderance of armed right wingers is what has led to this place being such a hotbed of criminality such that the headline on the latest issue of the local newspaper is this:
That’s two murders in only half a century! Clearly, this is a crime rate unprecedented in the civilized world. So, let’s check some math. For comparative purposes, how about the *previous* place I called home, the not-dissimilar Hollister, California. Both are relatively small, relatively dusty rural towns. According to Wikipedia, the population of Tremonton in 2010 (last census) is 7,647, that of Hollister is 34,928. Hollister is thus about 4.6 times as big as Tremonton. So if Tremonton has a murder every fifty years, Hollister should see one every 50/4.6 = 10.9 years. But then… Hollister is in the enlightened, utopian state of California, the state with the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, which banned the ownership of Evil Assault Weapons along with the sale of magazines capable of holding more than 10 bullets. So clearly Hollister should be that much safer than blighted Tremonton. So what’s the murder situation like in Hollister?
Fortunately, the city of Hollister maintains a website with some crime stats (although why should they need to, duh… everybody knows that California is safe as clams, what with the criminals being turned into harmless puppies by the state gun laws). According to that page, it seems there was one homicide in 2017. And there were zero in 2016. And zero in 2015! Well, case closed! Certainly no need to look further back, like to the three homicides in 2014, the four in 2013 or the one in 2012. And as for that one homicide in 2017, one need not question the confusion over the fact that there was this homicide and also that homicide, which the untrained mind might decide actually seems to indicate two homicides, not just one.
So, see? Tremonton, with its homicide rate of one per half century shows that Utah’s relatively lax gun laws and red-state culture is a terrible place compared to Hollister, where a mere nine (or is that ten?) homicides in a vast six year span show just how idyllic Californias gun laws and culture have made the place.
