know what you never hear about?

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Statistics or demographics about the lesser-populated states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. I mean, you never hear about the slums or ghettos of Helena or "gang violence erupted in North Dakota earlier today".

Just sayin'

First there needs to be something to base statistics on. Colony-on-colony violence amongst prairie dogs, maybe?

The word "demographics" starts with the syllable 'demo' which means "people".
So you're asking "why dont you hear about people in places where there are no people?"

put simply; you don't really ever hear about bad goings on in these states.

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/wycrime.htm

There are Polynesian gangs in Utah. Starting in the 1970s, Mormon missionaries converted large numbers of Polynesians, many of who eventually made their way to Utah, where they found discrimination and racism by white Mormons towards them. Many of their kids fell into drug dealing. The Polynesian areas of Salt Lake City are actually quite dangerous.

As for Montana, Helena only has about 20,000 people, so the inner areas were never abandoned, unlike areas in other states where relentless suburbanization caused ghettoization. I think that the largest city in Montana is Billings at around 90,000 people. The Native American reservations in that area can be quite dangerous-there's lots of drug and especially alcohol use, lots of anti-Indian bigotry, and the Natives commit most of the crime in many intermountain western areas.

In some places in Nevada, any white person venturing onto an Indian reservation is liable to wind up shot. The whites in town return the favor. In Fallon, Nevada (pop. 35,000), Native youths living on the east side of the valley organized themselves into a loose approximation of a gang, learning gang signs and rituals from the internet, and soon enough there was a competing gang and several murders. The whites were Not Amused. Stuff like that never comes to the level that it does in California, and mainly gets local coverage.

Silver Springs, halfway between Carson City and Fallon, has been called "five thousand meth addicts without a fix", and comparisons have been made to zombie movies and Haitian shantytowns. Over 90% of the housing is "mobile", there are hardly any jobs, and property crimes are frequent. There's no media there either, no newspaper or radio station, and newspapers in Fernley and Yerington don't cover it. The only way to find out how bad it is is via word of mouth.

It isn't that common in those states because the culture is just different. People tend to be more polite, friendly, and honest. If you want to compare New York City to Montana you would think you were on different planets.

Following the murder of Matthew Shepard I remember hearing far more about Wyoming than I would ever want to, in oh, six or seven lifetimes. Probably this was done -- and is still being done, his name is still brought up quite a bit -- for political reasons. After all, he had harmed no one, was apparently selected by his attackers in large part due to his homosexuality, and the whole sad story has the added bonus of allowing media types to stereotype people in "flyover" country as mouth-breathing troglodytes without actually having to explicitly say anything.

Note that I have no sympathy with Shepard's murderers; as far as I am concerned they could be taken out and hanged from nearest telephone poles. But what Shepard's murder generated: documentaries, plays, books, Congressional testimony, songs by Elton John and so on were all curiously absent in this torture/murder story: Media Tunes Out Child Torture Death which happened at about the same time, arguably was even more vicious, and the victim was a minor. Yet if Elton John has done any warbling about it, it is news to me.

http://www.montanasnews.tv/articles.php ... w&id=18190

okay, I'm talking about 'hearing of' like in the news.



I think people are missing the point.

Never mind.

I'm not talking about searching for data or the news. I'm talking about the news finding me. If I'm sitting watching the evening national news, there's a very small chance you'll hear about goings on in these states.

Are you really that rigid?