What a totally strange post.

Unintentionally I think we take safety for granted when it's built into the permanence of our day to day lives.

It's a more luxurious conceit than we realize. I wish this post was strange to me, too.

Or to paraphrase Wallace, "said one fish to the other, what the fck is water?"

Maybe an explanation is better, dunno.

That said, I don't know if including aggravated assault is the same as violence measured by murder rate.

• I want to bring up differences, maybe limitations, in using a 'violent city' metric that includes a range of violent crime, such as aggravated assault, by contrasting it with a 'violent city' metric that is measured per capita by homicides.

That's an interesting link, and violence is violence, to be sure. I also don't want to draw lines of demarcation when every act of violence directly affects lives.

• First two lines are preface to pad what I think would be understandable initial reactions to ""I think homicide is more telling" - that it's a glib contest.
  Specifically "violence is violence, to be sure" and " every act of violence directly affects lives" are attempts to inject some empathy as context, and humanize what is otherwise a grim introduction to discussing differences between violence in cities.

I think about this list often

• bring up the wikipedia list, with four american cities listed. these aren't listed on OP's list, as OP's list listed by smaller population, carving metro areas into - what I think - more easily digested, emotionally manageable ways of viewing crime in cities. The subtext here, or what I'm trying to convey, is OP's list encourages a person to think "see, not in my city, it's happening in other bad areas I don't live in" which (I think) carves up metropolitan areas, and is also part of problem, as people don't want to see that just a few streets away is a very different, dangerous city - but disconnecting ourselves from these areas - our neighbors - is what allows (I think) the violence to become systemic across generations. But instead of saying all this, I just posted a link to the list.

You are right, a lot of the Chicago violence is south side, and further south into Gary, Indiana

• Gary is a notoriously violent satellite town / suburb / exurb of Chicago. Reading over your comments, maybe you live in Chicago, I though OP does as well. Gary is in OP's list, but Chicago is not. I wanted to connect the two cities, and reference the list, without explaining why we should see them as more connected than we do.

But I dunno. I've been to many of those cities...

I know the list personally, but anecdotally point out how maybe OPs list isn't the best measure of which cities are more violent, because of my own experience. This is obviously cognitive bias, but it's an attempt to connect my own life experiences with street violence, which hopefully gives more punch in conveying that violence is deeper than Folk Nation or GD or the drug trade. It's part of people's lives, and untangling it is very, very difficult. But, this would take forever to write, and you showing someone how you arrived at a particular position is sometimes more effective (hopefully) than just saying, my way is right, here's why.

Or maybe put it another way...

Further attempt to illustrate Chicago is one large contagious human concern, and separating it into smaller pieces will continue to disconnect possible solutions from the problem of violence. This is done by illustrating both Beaumont and Bridgeport, which are on OPs list, have violence, but not the sort of endemic generational violence seen in larger cities like Chicago.

But, academics aside

We are conformably discussing violent atrocity on $2000 computers from $700K homes in well policed neighborhoods

the world is a different place, wherever you are, the moment someone puts a gun in your mouth.

Safety is a luxurious conceit. It's why we can argue which city is which. When really violence isn't measured by how close you are to which city, but how close you are to its streets.

The same ones we pass driving to work every day, or going home from the bar.

Some other violent city. Not ours.