Crime rates have a lot more to do with how many people there are than with social responsibility.

Within the last year, in the region where I live, we have had quite a few murders, and numerous other violent crimes, in small towns where, according to the conventional wisdom, one would not expect them. One, you know about. Among others, a young man shot his girlfriend's parents to death in their home and ran away with the girl. A young man strangled or bludgeoned several siblings, and his grandmother. Most recently a young man was shot and killed by two acquaintances, near where I work, in the hall just outside of the apartment where he lived with his fiancee and their week-old infant. A few years ago, two sets of murders, one a single and one a multiple, were committed by two unrelated people who each used a ball-peen hammer to the head as his weapon of choice. We have had murder-suicides, usually involving fathers with guns shooting children, and the smothering murder of two infants, one a newborn and one older, both by their teenaged mothers.

None of these were related to gangs, and only one had any connection with another crime. The killers were not, before their crimes, people that one would have thought of as dangerous. And yet, here we are.

And yes, the region is not known for its ethnic or religious diversity, unless you count 30 different Protestant sects as religious diversity. So one can't blame the behavior on racial tension or any other heterogeneity issue.

Small towns have our own sets of pathologies, not the least of which is the tendency, in the interest of "reputation", to conceal troubling behaviors that in a larger, more anonymous urban environment, with less concern about rocking society's boat, would have been reported.