Whether you’re trying to ensure or avoid dying by assault in the United States, Kieran Healy, associate professor of sociology at Duke, can help you figure out where to turn your compass. Using data gathered between 1999 and 2013, Healy composed several graphs tracking assault deaths by state, and then broke the data out into regions.
The thick lines represent regional averages of death by assault, while the dotted lines represent state totals. That green dotted line reaching into the uppermost quadrant of the South’s plot belongs to Louisiana, by far the national leader in deaths-by-assault. Maybe True Detective and True Blood really were...true.