And of course down there “People are armed to the teeth.”
And from the comment thread on a 2021 NYT story that asks in its headline “WHY DOES LOUISIANA CONSISTENTLY LEAD THE NATION IN MURDERS?” :
Combine the [nation’s] highest rate of gun ownership with the lowest rate of education, sprinkle in some STRONG white supremacy and insurrection and that spells doom for all Louisianans.
There are close to five hundred comments on the article, many of them from Louisianans, and most commenters agree that while you’re free to consider variables like a history of violence and an engrained distrust of government and its institutions, the crucial element is simply stunning numbers of guns in the hands of hyperemotional (the motive is often ‘disrespect’) and unschooled people.
Equally stunning but absolutely predictably, the killers are getting younger and younger, as in the latest story out of the blood-soaked Baton Rouge area, involving a high school kid blowing away one schoolmate and injuring two.