The U2 Getting a final Upgrade before retirement.

 The "U-2" is still flying after its successor the Very famous "SR-71" was retired in the 1990's I believe.

    The famous "Dragon Lady will finally be retiring.  I am of 2 minds, part of me says that Satellites can do the same job but safer, and the other half says that you need something with a fast response time, and I guess they have drones for that now...

      I got this from a 3rd party email from my work.

A U-2S flies with the avionics tech refresh upgrade in the cockpit for the first time.

Credit: Lockheed Martin

A final upgrade for the Lockheed Martin U-2S is moving forward after the U.S. Air Force and the company’s Skunk Works unit completed a first flight of an avionics technology refresh in the cockpit. 

In addition to refreshing the displays, communication suite and navigation system in the U-2S cockpit, the program also installs a new mission computer that is compatible with the Air Force’s open mission systems (OMS) standard. 

The OMS-compliant computer will allow the Air Force to install the latest version of the Raytheon Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System (ASARS)-2, according to budget justification documents.
Despite the latest upgrades, the Air Force currently plans to retire the U-2S fleet by the end of fiscal 2026. 

But the new electronics will help pilots fly missions for the remainder of the fleet’s operational life.

“The successful first flight of the U-2 Avionics Tech Refresh [ATR] is a significant moment in our journey to rapidly and affordably field new capabilities,” said Sean Thatcher, the U-2 Avionics Tech Refresh program manager at the Skunk Works.

The ATR and ASARS upgrades are scheduled to complete flight testing in the first half of 2024, according to budget documents released in March. The first two ASARS-2C radars are then scheduled to be fielded in July 2024.

Creating a "hellscape if China invades Taiwan.

 I pulled this from a 3rd party email...I was surprised that this information was freely available, I kinda thought they would not tip their hand to a potential adversary, unless they are going to try to "warn them off".

The U.S. Army has ordered 1,000 RQ-28 drones from Skydio and plans to award a competitive follow-on contract next spring for thousands more.

Credit: Defense Innovation Unit

A new operational concept within the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command proposes to use a horde of drones to turn the Taiwan Strait into a “hellscape” if China attempts to invade Taiwan.

To realize that vision, the Defense Department has created several new efforts to solve the industrial, bureaucratic and command-and-control issues posed by unleashing thousands of drones simultaneously into the air, water and land around the roughly 100-nm channel between mainland China and Taiwan.

• The concept’s plans draw on Ukraine lessons
• DARPA supports Replicator with new autonomy program

The multiple projects, including the Pentagon’s recently announced Replicator and DARPA’s Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy (REMA) programs, seek to enhance and accelerate the programs of record already underway by each of the armed services to field tens of thousands of drones—including uncrewed air vehicles (UAV), uncrewed surface vessels (USV) and uncrewed ground vehicles—in the next several years.

As the Army leadership prepares to address the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting that begins Oct. 9, the service’s acquisition officials are working behind the scenes to offer several ongoing drone acquisition programs for the Pentagon’s new fast-tracking and capability upgrade efforts, such as Replicator and REMA.

Speaking to reporters on Sept. 20, Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, said the service is working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to understand how the existing programs could be included in the Replicator effort, but added that he hopes such a move would result in additional funding for the ongoing programs.

“In the unmanned aircraft space—[which is] especially where I think we could go faster—we’re limited by funding at this point,” Bush said. “But I think we’ve got some good systems that with more funding and some help on accelerating the process, the Army absolutely could contribute to the overall Replicator efforts.”

Heeding lessons from the Russia--Ukraine war, the Army already plans to award a contract next spring for up to 12,000 small quadcopter drones under the Short-Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program. Meanwhile, efforts continue to field thousands of Air-Launched Effects (ALE) as part of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft ecosystem of sensors and munitions. That ecosystem includes the tube-launched ALE-Small, which includes uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) such as the Anduril Altius, and ALE-Large, a more secretive project that is known to involve at least UAS such as the L3Harris Technologies Red Wolf.

The Army programs would add to thousands of more drones of all sizes and performance levels in development or production across the U.S. military. In the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan of the last two decades, only dozens of uncrewed systems were in operation at any single time. In the decade ahead, thousands of drones could perform missions simultaneously. The transition is being informed by ongoing experiments such as the Navy’s Task Force 59 and the Air Force’s Task Force 99.

Lessons from those experiments have been folded into Hellscape, an operating concept developed over several years in secret. Adm. John Aquilino, commander of Indo-Pacific Command, revealed the idea in cryptic fashion on Aug. 28 at the Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition.

“The components in Indo-Pacom have been experimenting for the past 5-10 years with many of those unmanned capabilities. Those will be an asymmetric advantage,” Aquilino said. “So operational concepts that we’re working through are going to help amplify our advantages in this theater. There is a term, ‘Hellscape,’ that we use.”

The concept appears to mark a departure from operating concepts focused on employing limited numbers of expensive and exquisite weapon systems against an array of enemy targets. Naval attacks by Ukraine’s military have shown the power of weaponizing thousands of disposable, commercial drones against enemy formations, as well as targeting enemy ships in the Black Sea with large numbers of crude USVs that function like an overwhelming salvo of guided torpedoes.

Any invasion of Taiwan by China would require transporting an amphibious invasion force across the strait. The transit would expose dozens or even hundreds of large ships to drone attacks from the time they are loaded in port until the troops attempt to disembark along the Taiwanese coast. Modern naval ships are equipped with a range of defensive countermeasures to thwart a limited number of attacks from drones, torpedoes and anti-ship missiles. But the Hellscape concept proposes a way to overwhelm those countermeasures with dozens or hundreds of simultaneous drone attacks.

Thousands of commercial drones, including such uncrewed surface vessels as the Saildrone Explorer, that share a common autonomy “brain” are envisioned by the newly unveiled Replicator concept. Credit: Petty Officer 2nd Class Jeremy Boan/U.S. Navy

“I think [Hellscape] is creating a chaotic, unpredictable situation in the Taiwan Strait using unmanned systems—mostly surface systems, but maybe also some undersea systems and ones that are relatively inexpensive,” Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and now the director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, told Aviation Week.

“They’re taking the cue . . . from what the Ukrainians have done and [asking], ‘Can we apply that model in the Taiwan Strait?’ Because you’ve got a similar, kind of, fish-in-a-barrel sort of opportunity,” Clark added.

The concept may not be unique to the Indo-Pacific Command. Seeking to bolster asymmetric defensive capabilities against a Chinese amphibious invasion, the 2023 National Defense Report published on Sept. 12 by Taiwan’s defense ministry calls for buying 7,000 commercial drones and 700 military-grade UAVs in the next five years.

Similarly, the U.S. Defense Department unveiled the Replicator concept in late August, calling for fielding thousands of “attritable” drones across all domains within 18-24 months. Many details of the concept are still being worked out, but early descriptions by defense officials suggest  the concept’s purpose is not about creating a new program of record. Instead, the goal is to create a new acquisition process that can support the speed and flexibility needed to make Indo-Pacific Command’s Hellscape possible.

“Let’s be crystal clear: Replicator is not a new program of record. We’re not creating a new bureaucracy,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said on Sept. 6 at the Defense News Conference. “And we will not be asking for new money in [fiscal 2024]. Not all problems need new money; we are problem solvers, and we intend to self-solve.”

The first priority for Replicator is to develop a new software platform. To overcome the Chinese military’s advantage in numbers, Replicator aims to focus initially on developing a capability for all-domain, attritable autonomy (ADA2), Hicks said. Details remain scarce, but her comments indicate that such a common software suite could be rapidly integrated on different types of drones, whether they are designed to fly, float or drive.

Two weeks after Hicks unveiled the Replicator concept, DARPA revealed a new program with goals similar to the ADA2 effort. REMA, launched on Sept. 12, proposes to develop a hardware adapter for different types of commercial drones and create a common mission autonomy suite that can be hosted on that adapter. Moreover, the goal of the REMA program is to produce the initial version of adapter and software system within 18 months, which aligns with the schedule for fielding the Replicator concept.

The drones that are equipped with the REMA software would have special abilities unavailable on standard commercial drones. If a control or communications link to the drone is lost, the REMA autonomy software would allow them to continue performing some aspects of their mission by making their own decisions. Software updates and upgrades could be developed, tested and released to all of the REMA adapter-equipped drones in monthly cycles.

“REMA sounds like it’s pretty much aligned with this idea,” Clark said. “We want to make the [Replicator] vehicles as commoditized as possible, and we’re going to focus our technology development effort on the application layer that rides on top of their control software.”

Meanwhile, the armed services are continuing to develop military-grade drones. The SRR program awarded a contract to Skydio last year to deliver 1,000 RQ-28A quadcopters. A follow-on award is expected next spring for up to 12,000 more drones, with Skydio, Teal and Vantage Robotics competing for the order.

Why Men Think of the Roman Empire...

 

I have seen the Meme's involving "The Roman Empire" that have been floating around farcebook and other social media sites,    I do think of the Roman Empire and I do believe that there are a lot of parallels between them and us.  

   One of the books I have in my library I have in my Bonus room.   I see the strength and the decadence, and I wonder if we will survive or will the barbarians from the East will win with the internal rot I am seeing in our society.   

    

      I shamelessly clipped this from "Townhall.com"   It explained the phenomenon better.

    The Pics are compliments of "Bing" except of the one of my book, I took that one...

Unless you’ve been under a rock the last couple of weeks, you’ve likely heard about the Roman Empire trend on TikTok, in which women are shocked to learn that their husbands and boyfriends spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about, well, the Roman Empire.

One of the more popular videos has over five million views and the trend has inspired countless other women to ask the men in their lives how often they ponder the greatness of Rome.

I personally have been asked no fewer than ten times, by various people, how often I think about it, and my answer is always the same: daily. It doesn’t hurt that my various text threads and Twitter group chats frequently share Roman-themed jokes and memes. As long as my phone is in my hand, Rome is on my mind.

And I think I know why.

There is much to admire about the ancient world, and so much to despise about the modern world, and it is at these intersections that Rome’s resurgent popularity lies.

Men crave greatness

We demand it from our football teams, our politicians (yes, we are often stupid) and our children.

Greatness can mean many things, of course, but it generally refers to achievement or dominance of a particular arena, both of which are derided these days as products of misogyny.

We desire competition and often go to great lengths to discover “what we are made of,” yet the society in which we currently find ourselves considers such masculine instincts to be “toxic.”

So who can blame us if our minds naturally harken back to a time when men were at their most? Be it marching in legions to conquer exotic lands, outmaneuvering your enemies in the Senate or battling to the death in an arena to the roar of bloodthirsty spectators, Ancient Rome has plenty to offer in terms of personal greatness.

And in an era where achievement is demonized, men long for an era when it was prized.

Men seek brotherhood

Such bonding, however, is becoming more difficult in an increasingly virtual world.

I’ve yet to analyze the demographics, but in my own (admittedly anecdotal) experience the men fawning over Rome’s glory days fall into two camps: they are either older millennials or members of the Greatest Generation. And by that I mean Gen X, of course. This makes sense when you consider that, although the virtual world isn’t exactly foreign to us, in too many ways it rings hollow. We grew up playing video games, sure, if it was pouring rain out or too late at night (at least until we discovered girls). 

But our fondest memories were not made in front of a screen. Rather, they were largely forged by bruising our bodies alongside our best friends. Be it backyard football games or questionable bicycle ramps, there’s an irreplaceable bond that comes with shared physical pain.

Which is why the growing disdain for personal interaction brought about by COVID, social media and the Metaverse is alienating to so many of us. It’s not that we are Luddites, but rather that we prefer the real over the artificial.

A natural reaction to false progress is a pivot toward tradition, and few eras evoke the longing to RETVRN like Ancient Rome does.

As Jeremy Armstrong notes in the Journal of Ancient History, “Family bonds, and particularly fraternal relationships, play key roles in many of the narratives relating to Rome’s Regal and early Republican periods. In particular, the literary sources for these periods are full of references to brothers standing side by side, fighting for, and in many ways embodying (sometimes quite literally), the various social and political entities which were struggling for supremacy in archaic Latium.”

Some things, it seems, never change, and if you’re seeking shining examples of fraternity, it’s hard to beat the greatest empire the world has ever known.

Men must dream

For a long time America fulfilled our need to dream, as the cultural explosion at the beginning of the twentieth century produced no shortage of heroes and myths with which to identify.

But those days seem a distant memory. What works of real value has Hollywood, or the arts in this country in general, produced recently? Hardly anything as far as I can tell. Rather, we are subjected to countless comic book adaptations and endless reboots of exhausted franchises, creating a cultural vacuum longing to be filled.

Few eras offer a more viable substitute than do Rome’s glory days. While the Empire is in many ways infamous for its debauchery and excesses, those were largely relegated to societal elites (sound familiar?). The culture Rome produced, however, is unrivaled and lives on to this day, from art to architecture to language to law. How can we be faulted for admiring the West’s foundations, even as the West itself crumbles?

As the modern world fails to inspire devotion to our own civilization, it’s only natural that we seek those feelings out elsewhere. And what could possibly compete with Rome, the genesis of the cultural greatness currently being tossed aside like trash by a West that has lost its way.

I submit that if anything, we think about Rome too little in this post-Hollywood era.

Simply put, as guys like myself see our own nation, largely modeled after Rome herself, decline into depravity, it’s difficult to resist looking back and dreaming about what our ideals can achieve when unencumbered by modernity’s psychoses.

And if that strikes some women as strange, just know the feeling is mutual. We think yoga is weird and pumpkin spice is gross as hell.

Firearm Death by Statistic and Gangs.

 I ran across this on Quora while taking a break at work, I am still running heavy in the overtime so blogging will still be hit or miss.  The information presented was very informative and thorough.  I figured any bloggers could use the information especially those still living in the blue cities. 

Ray Erickson

Knows a thing or two about guns, gun laws, and gun culture.Jul 15

Is it true that most US homicides are gang-related? Does it mean ordinary citizens are usually safe from murderers?

It’s very likely that approximately 80–85% of homicides (and especially firearm homicides) in the United States are gang-related:

Fair warning: This is going to be a very long one, so if you’d prefer to skip the dry statistics backing up this answer, feel free to just quickly scroll through the maps and you’ll see, visually, just how heavily concentrated the majority of murders are within known gang territories in the United States.

All graphics are clickable to zoom, and are best viewed on desktop for fine detail.

Gun control advocates will sometimes point to this survey:

National Youth Gang Survey Analysis

The National Gang Center conducted an annual survey of law enforcement agencies to assess the extent of gang problems. Their findings are presented here.

https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/survey-analysis

…which claims that:

The total number of gang homicides reported by respondents in the NYGS sample averaged nearly 2,000 annually from 2007 to 2012. During roughly the same time period (2007 to 2011), the FBI estimated, on average, more than 15,500 homicides across the United States (www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1). These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually.

The problem is that that number only reflects the fraction of homicides that local law enforcement was certain involved gang activity. Most are classified as “unknown.” Furthermore, many surveys estimating gang statistics relied on self-reporting by prison inmates, turning the survey into a very scholarly version of “so, what are you in for?” Surely, no methodological errors there!

So how can we arrive at more reliable figures?

Gang Triangulation | Estimating Gang Firearm Homicide Extent | Gun Facts

Data triangulation leads to an estimate that 85% of firearm homicides in the United States are gang related.

https://www.gunfacts.info/blog/gang-triangulation/

This article (hosted by GunFacts.info, the brainchild of Guy Smith) is a great place to start, but I’d like to expand upon the statistics to visually to get a sense of who it is that’s getting killed and where these homicides are occurring.

So, let’s start here:

This is the age bracket of the bodies that end up on the floor, for both all homicides and specifically firearm homicides.

This is the skin color of the bodies that end up on the floor due to firearm homicide.

The 2019 figures are even worse:

Put both of these data points together, and it’s clear that a disproportionate amount of firearm homicide victims (and offenders!) are black males in their teens to late twenties.

Why is this the case? Well, it’s not quite within the purview of this answer, but here you go:

Real Talk about Race and Murder Rates

It's not the guns, it's not the genetics, it's not the economics, it's the dads.

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/real-talk-about-race-and-murder-rates

And where are these homicides occurring?

Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural

This is the the data I’d like to dive into in much greater visual detail.

Let’s examine the Top 25 cities in the United States for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter:

List of United States cities by crime rate - Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The following table of United States cities by crime rate is based on Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) statistics from 2019 for the 100 most populous cities in America that have reported data to the FBI UCR system. [1] The population numbers are based on U.S. Census estimates for the year end. The number of murders includes nonnegligent manslaughter . This list is based on the reporting. In most cases, the city and the reporting agency are identical. However, in some cases such as Charlotte, Honolulu, and Las Vegas, the reporting agency has more than one municipality. Murder is the only statistic that all agencies are required to report. Consequently, some agencies do not report all the crimes. If components are missing the total is adjusted to 0. Note about population [ edit ] Often, one obtains very different results depending on whether crime rates are measured for the city jurisdiction or the metropolitan area. [2] Information is voluntarily submitted by each jurisdiction and some jurisdictions do not appear in the table because they either did not submit data or they did not meet deadlines. The FBI website has this disclaimer on population estimates: For the 2019 population estimates used in this table, the FBI computed individual rates of growth from one year to the next for every city/town and county using 2010 decennial population counts and 2011 through 2018 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Each agency’s rates of growth were averaged; that average was then applied and added to its 2018 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2019 population estimate. [3] It should also be mentioned that the FBI has recently switched its data reporting mechanism and currently some major metropolitan police departments (e.g. Baltimore) have not been included in the total. Crime rates [ edit ] State City Population Yearly Crime Rates per 100,000 people Total Violent crime Property crime Arson 2 Murder and Nonnegligent manslaughter Rape 1 Robbery Aggravated assault Total Burglary Larceny- theft Motor vehicle theft Total Alabama Mobile 3 248,431 6217.02 20.13 58.16 177.11 485.85 740.25 1,216.84 3,730.21 506.78 5,453.83 22.94 Alaska Anchorage 296,188 6640.04 9.12 132.01 262.67 799.49 1,203.29 748.17 3,619.66 1,047.98 5,415.82 20.93 Arizona Chandler 249,355 2589.08 2.01 52.13 56.95 148.68 259.47 314.41 1,866.01 149.18 2,329.61 Arizona Gilbert 242,090 1483.75 2.07 16.11 21.07 46.26 85.51 192.49 1,137.59 55.76 1,385.85 12.39 Arizona Glendale 249,273 5037.85 4.81 38.91 192.96 251.53 488.22 637.45 3,426.36 466.56 4,530.37 19.26 Arizona Mesa 492,268 2592.49 4.67 51.19 92.23 267.74 415.83 381.50 1,610.91 179.58 2,171.99 4.67 Arizona Phoenix 1,608,139 4443.2 9.55 69.46 200.28 481.64 760.93 778.57 2,426.69 465.46 3,670.71 11.56 Arizona Scottsdale 251,840 2338.38 1.99 40.90 39.71 74.65 157.24 348.63 1,725.70 97.68 2,172.01 9.13 Arizona Tucson 532,323 6082.78 8.64 93.55 268.82 430

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate

I’ll be using Wikipedia’s reported statistics for calculation purposes (the right column is per 100,000):

And the FBI’s UCR data on Expanded Homicide, to arrive at a total figure of 13,927 murder/MS victims in 2019.

I will be making use of two major tools on a city-by-city basis:

The first tool is a website devoted to street culture, and more specifically for our purposes, established gang territories. I’ve opted to drop their color code key showing which gangs are which for the sake of simplicity, but if you’re interested, you can load up the city of your choice and probably learn more about that city’s gangs than you wanted to know.

Street Maps Archives

67 posts Browsing category Street Maps April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 1 Mins read April 2, 2023 3 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 2 Mins read April 2, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 4 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 6 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 5 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 5 Mins read February 17, 2023 5 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 3 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 3 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 1 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read February 17, 2023 2 Mins read April 15, 2022 1 Mins read April 15, 2022 4 Mins read April 15, 2022 1 Mins read April 15, 2022 2 Mins read April 15, 2022 2 Mins read April 15, 2022 1 Mins read April 15, 2022 1 Mins read April 15, 2022 1 Mins read April 15, 2022 2 Mins read January 30, 2022 1 Mins read

https://www.kulturevulturez.com/page/streetz-culture/

The second tool is an interactive map showing where shootings have occurred within the United States down to the street level. Red dots are firearm fatalities, yellow dots are nonfatal injuries. The Atlas allows you to filter one or the other out, but I’ve opted to show the full data set for two main reasons: including the yellow nonfatal dots highlights those areas of gang activity in stark contrast, which in turn makes it much easier to quickly compare the smaller thumbnail graphics instead of forcing you to look at the fullscreen version for each map.

An Atlas of American Gun Violence

Nine years. 330,000 shootings. How has gun violence marked your corner of the U.S.?

https://www.thetrace.org/2018/12/gun-violence-interactive-shootings-map/

Nevertheless, the Atlas is freely available if you’d like to see just the fatal shootings for just 2019 for each city, since that’s the actual figures I’ll be working with at the end.

This is a map of all the fatal shootings GVA has on record for 2019. I’ve circled the top 25 cities (by rate) we’ll be looking at in greater detail.

The goal is showing, visually, just how much overlap there is with known gang neighborhoods.

All maps can be enlarged to show detail.

So with no further ado, let’s get started.

#1 on the list in 2019 was St. Louis, MO. In any given year the Top 5 shuffle around a bit, but St. Louis is always near the top.

#2 was Baltimore, MD, also a perennial contender for most murderous city in the US:

#3 was Detroit, MI. What I find particularly interesting is the obvious cutoff right at 8 Mile Road. Kulture Vulturez also does not list Inkster, Pontiac, Ypsilanti, or Boynton (River Rouge) as gang territories, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the clusters there. I’ve never been to Detroit, so maybe somebody with more experience than me can enlighten us all in the comments; it’d be a great confirmation of the theory if those are in fact gang territories that simply weren’t listed.

#4 was New Orleans, LA.

#5 was Baton Rouge, LA.

#6 was Kansas City, MO.

#7 was Cleveland, OH.

#8 was Memphis, TN.

#9 was Newark, NJ.

#10 was Cincinnatti, OH.

#11 was Mobile, AL.

#12 was Philadelphia, PA.

#13 was Milwaukee, WI.

#14 was Chicago, IL. Chicago leads the nation in absolute number of murders, in large part because it was a city of 2.75 million in 2019. It’s also enough of a challenge to

present graphically that I’ll do 2 sets of maps; one zoomed out to encompass the suburbs, and one zoomed in to see the density of the inner city.

#15 was Pittsburg, PA. The gang areas for McKeesport and Clairton (bottom center) and Aliquippa (top left) are small and easy to miss, but they’re there. I’d be interested to know if New Kensington (top right) has gangs that aren’t listed since it’s also a minor hotspot.

#16 was Indianapolis, IN.

#17 was Stockton, CA. Unfortunately, Kulture Vulturez did not have a premade map showing the gang areas of Stockton. The red pin is Stockton’s City Hall, indicating its “downtown” area where gang activity usually clusters.

#18 was Tulsa, OK.

#19 was Washington DC.

#20 was Atlanta, GA.

#21 was Nashville, TN.

#22 was Columbus, OH.

#23 was Oakland, CA. Kulture Vulturez has a page devoted to “Bay Area Hoods,” so again I’ll show the zoomed-out area map, then the zoomed-in Oakland map.

#24 was Louisville (Metro), KY

#25 was Greensboro, NC. Kulture Vulturez did not have an entry for this city either, so as before I pinned the government center to indicate “inner city Greensboro.”

Are your eyes crossing yet? Yeah, mine too. But not to worry!

So far we’ve only looked at 2 of the 10 “million plus” cities in the US (Chicago and Philadelphia), 2 below the 250,000 mark (Mobile and Baton Rouge), and the other 21 are all somewhere in between.

These Top 25 cities by rate only contained 4.72% of the population in 2019, but accounted for 28.3% of the nation’s murders!

Well, that wasn’t too bad.

How about we pick up the other 8 “million plus” cities for their absolute numbers and see where that puts us statistically?

#1: New York, NY (Pop. 8.8 million in 2019)

#2: Los Angeles, CA (Pop. 3.9 million) A city with so much gang activity, it has not one but two pages on Kulture Vulturez.

Los Angeles Hoods: Top 25 South Los Angeles Gangs

View South Los Angeles hoods with a List of Top 25 Los Angeles Gangs: 1. Rollin 60s 2. Hoovers 3. 83 Gangster Crips 4. Florencia 13 5.

https://www.kulturevulturez.com/top-los-angeles-hoods/

East L.A.: Breakdown of East Los Angeles Gangs

Deep embeded in the East Los Angeles ghetto is culture, a lifesyle, a background, and much more as East Los Angeles gangs have turn the area...

https://www.kulturevulturez.com/east-los-angeles-ghetto-story/

There’s almost no point in posting the gangland maps. East LA, South Central, Compton, Hollywood… The entire L.A. area is effectively all gang territory until you start moving into outlying cities like Torrence, Glendale, or Arcadia.

#3 was Chicago, IL (Pop. 2.74 million). Already covered at #14 by crime rate.

#4: Houston, TX (Pop. 2.3 million)

#5: Phoenix, AZ (Pop. 1.6 million)

#6 was Philadelphia, PA (Pop. 1.6 million). Already covered at #12 by rate.

#7: San Antonio, TX (Pop. 1.4 million) Kulture Vulturez mentions its gang activity, but does not include a map.

#8: San Diego, CA (Pop. 1.4 million)

#9: Dallas, TX (Pop. 1.3 million). The map also includes Fort Worth (Pop. 873k), at #17 by size. I won’t be including Fort Worth in the math for this answer, but it does help show the strong correlation between gang hotspots and where the bodies turn up.

#10: San Jose, CA (Pop. 1 million). It was actually at the south end of the overview “Bay Area Hoods” map for #23, but let’s get a closeup of San Jose specifically.

If we add in the figures for the other 8 megacities, we’re looking at a total of 11.4% of the country’s population but 38.2% of all murders for the entire country!

And keep in mind, that’s not counting all the (2019) red dots you’ve seen, that’s just the ones that fell within city limits of the places listed!

The other places (like Fort Worth in #9 of the “million plus” cities list) were part of the other 3,060 cities in the US with a population of 10,000 people or more, making up the other 61.8% of murders in 2019. 52% of counties in the country had zero murders.

So now that you’ve seen the maps, you tell me; what percentage of dots fall within those established gang territories?

And like everyone else, gangbangers don’t just stay at home; they travel to other parts of the city. A substantial number of dots outside the defined boxes are also gang-related murders, as they encounter each other at the local Shake Shack or whatever.

So to answer the original question, you’re probably very safe from being murdered as long as you stay out of the inner city areas that tend to be gang violence breeding grounds.

But now I’d like to veer off the original question a bit and address how we can best reduce the murder/manslaughter rates.

Just as murders are not spread out evenly across the country, neither are they evenly distributed amongst the violent criminal population. Like many other things in life, murder follows the Pareto Principle, AKA the 80/20 Rule:

Pareto principle - Wikipedia

Statistical principle about ratio of effects to causes The Pareto principle may apply to fundraising, i.e. 20% of the donors contributing towards 80% of the total The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). [1] Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule , the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. [2] [3] Management consultant Joseph M. Juran developed the concept in the context of quality control and improvement after reading the works of Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto , who wrote about the 80/20 connection while teaching at the University of Lausanne . [4] In his first work, Cours d'économie politique , Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in the Kingdom of Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to the Pareto efficiency . Mathematically, the 80/20 rule is roughly described by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution ) for a particular set of parameters. Many natural phenomena distribute according to power law statistics. [5] It is an adage of business management that "80% of sales come from 20% of clients." [6] History [ edit ] In 1941, Joseph M. Juran, a Romanian-born American engineer, came across the work of Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto . Pareto noted that approximately 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population. [7] [5] Juran applied the observation that 80% of an issue is caused by 20% of the causes to quality issues. Later during his career, Juran preferred to describe this as "the vital few and the useful many" to highlight that the contribution of the remaining 80% should not be discarded entirely. [8] In economics [ edit ] Pareto's observation was in connection with population and wealth. Pareto noticed that approximately 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population. [7] He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied [ citation needed ] (see concentration of land ownership ). A chart that gave the effect a very visible and comprehensible form, [ clarification needed ] the so-called "champagne glass" effect, [9] [ better source needed ] was contained in the 1992 United Nations Development Program Report, which showed that the distribution of global income is very uneven, with the richest 20% of the world's population receiving 82.7% of the world's income. [10] However, among nations, the Gini index shows that wealth distributions vary substantially around this norm. [11] Distribution of world GDP, 1989 [12] Quintile of population Income Richest 20% 82.70% Second 20% 11.75% Third 20% 2.30% Fourth 20% 1.85% Poorest 20% 1.40% The principle also holds within the tails of the distribution. The physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland, College Park and AC Silva analyzed income data from the US Internal Revenue Service fr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

What this means in the context of gang murder is that (very approximately) 80% of the country’s murders are committed by (very approximately) 20% of the population. But this distribution is repeatable! 80% of the murders of that gang subset (or 64% of total murders) are committed by only 20% of that subset of criminals, or a mere 4% of the people. Reiterate again, and 51% of the entire country’s murders are committed by only 0.8% of the population. That’s the most violent, recidivistic 2.6 million people in a country of 328 million (using 2019 population statistics).

For reference, that is just slightly less than the total population of Chicago.

If District Attorneys actually enforced the “violent felon in possession of a firearm” statutes that are already part of Federal law, carrying mandatory minimums of 5 years or more in prison, we’d see a dramatic reduction in the overall US homicide rate, without negatively affecting peaceable citizens at all.