The graph is, in a large way, an inversion of population density.

That’s one correlation but it seems like that conjecture doesn’t extend to Florida or Texas.

It’s a correlation but the correlation probably wouldn’t be so high. The north east is plenty dense compared to the south east (iirc). I think this really shows a cultural difference amid population and probably other things.

I’ve outside of this heard the South has in someways never really bounced back from the end of slavery. Could be a kind of cultural scar or lack of “infrastructure”. Like how Lincoln’s reconstruction plans never happened and his successor went a quite different direction.

If we’re jumping to conclusions a much simpler explanation would be that Republican led states enact policies that lead to poor health outcomes.

> Could be a kind of cultural scar

At least anecdotally it feels that way.

I moved from one of the states that was totally clear in this map, to eastern Texas when I was younger and the social scars from the civil war still exist and by the way some people talk even to this day, you'ld think the war had ended last year. It was complete insanity to me.

You might want to take another look at that map and then look at where the big cities in florida and texas are located. The smoking blob pretty much stops at the major cities in Texas and the population centers of Florida are white as California.

The population centers are also democratic hotbeds so it’s most likely a matter of policy.

For firearm suicides it sort of is, but not really so much for the rest. I'm looking at the density map here [1].

[1] https://vividmaps.com/us-population-density/

Background checks for firearm sales are doing a lot.

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/06/background-check-buy-a-gun-...

Though as the sister comment mentions, low-density settings also seem to correlate, at least for the counties outside of the South.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fj...

It's a political paper that helps reduce trust in science. The way that the non targeted areas were pure white, was clearly designed to accentuate an arbitrary point -- there is no purely scientific definition for "hotspot". A non-political paper would have shown a proper gradient, for all regions.