Do White Kentuckians Stay Hair-Trigger Ornery Even in Wisconsin?

Do binge-drinking but genial white Wisconsinites get more rootin'-tootin' when they move to Kentucky?

Here’s a new study by state of white Americans born back to 1933 of their likelihood to murder or be murdered.

For example, wherever they happened to move within the U.S., whites born in (Scots-Irish, coal-mining, feuding) Kentucky tended to be more likely to be involved in a homicide, whether as a perpetrator or victim, than whites born in (German, hard-working, but binge-drinking) Wisconsin.

(By the way, the two drunkest places I’ve ever been on a Saturday night were Ballybunion, Ireland following Ireland’s astonishing upset of defending champion Italy in the first game of the 1994 soccer World Cup and downtown Madison, WI next to the flagship university campus on a run-of-the-mill cold Saturday night in February 1988. How do Wisconsinites get so drunk without, apparently, doing much serious harm to each other?)

From Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Migration and the persistence of violence

Martin Vinæs Larsen, Gabriel S. Lenz, and Anna Mikkelborg

Edited by Mary Waters, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; received January 13, 2025; accepted September 28, 2025

November 24, 2025

122 (48) e2500535122

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2500535122

Significance

Why do some regions experience high rates of violence for generations, while others remain safe? This research uncovers a crucial insight: When individuals move from historically dangerous to safer areas, a significant part of their original risk of violent victimization travels with them. This suggests that the roots of violence are not solely determined by a person’s current circumstances but also by persistent characteristics—perhaps learned behaviors or cultural adaptations—that migrants carry from their original environments. Our findings, based on millions of US migrants, help explain how high homicide rates can stubbornly endure across different places and times.

Abstract

Using data on millions of internal US migrants, we document that historical homicide rates follow migrants around the United States. Individuals born in historically safe states remain safer wherever they go, while individuals born in historically dangerous states face a greater risk, including from police violence. This pattern holds across demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and marital status, across migrant groups with different average levels of education, income, and even when comparing migrants from different states who reside in the same county. To help understand why, we conducted a large national survey that oversampled internal White US migrants. The results suggest this persistence may reflect a sociocultural adaptation to dangerous settings.

Who wasn’t included in this interesting study?

Paywall here.