Are you failing to take per capita measurements in that assessment? I think per capita violent crime, gun violence in particular, is high in rural areas. Seems to me what you're saying is "a lot of people live in cities".
This is very much false. Rural areas have very little violent crime, in both absolute and per-capita terms. I encourage you to spend some time looking into this, with the focus on “why did I ever think this could be true”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun-violence-in-rur...
It’s true that New York City was exceptionally safe from 2000 to 2018 or so. But the same data shows big cities have double the homicide rate of no metro areas.
> The NCVS involves about a quarter of a million interviews each year with a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents. The federal government’s field agents ask respondents whether they were the victim of a crime within the past six months. According to the NCVS, violent crime in urban areas rose 29 percent from 2020 to 2021, from 19.0 to 24.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons aged 12 or older. From 2018 through 2020, the NCVS found that the violent-crime rate in urban areas was between 29 percent and 42 percent higher than the rate in rural areas. In 2021, however, the violent-crime rate in urban areas was 121 percent higher, more than doubling the rate in rural areas (24.5 victimizations in urban areas, versus 11.1 in rural areas, per 1,000 persons). In addition, the violent-crime rate in urban areas was 48 percent higher in 2021 than in suburban areas, more than tripling any difference in urban and suburban rates registered from 2018 to 2020. The property-crime rate in urban areas was nearly twice as high in 2021 as in suburban areas (157.5 to 86.8 victimizations per 1,000 households) and nearly three times as high as in rural areas (157.5 to 57.7 victimizations per 1,000 households).
Bloomberg travels with a contingent of bodyguards armed with FULLY automatic weapons. He caused quite a stir after landing in Bermuda for a stay. Bermuda is so anti-gun that even its own police force isn’t armed, but Bloomberg's guards were.