There are tens of thousands of towns, villages, and cities that see little to no gun violence each year. But they don't get written up in the Daily Fail.
The violent crime rate in Chicago is lower than ~30 other US cities. It sits about even with Tulsa.
The thing that makes Chicago stand out is that its population transforms the rate into a larger raw number.
I decided to check the right-wing conspiracy theory that if you dropped the top four Democratic controlled cities from the US numbers, we'd be in the range of other 1st world democracies. No idea which cities those are supposed to be, but I assume Chicago and NY and LA and St Louis.
Spoiler alert, we're not. Even throwing out all gunshot murders from IL, CA, NY, LA, MO (New Orleans), while keeping the population, still doesn't get us below 2x rate of CAN. You have to toss TX, NJ, MT, OK, to get in the ballpark.
Edit: sorry, missed you were talking about murders; I was using data for all deaths.
And just because a town isn't incorporated doesn't mean it's small. Pahrump, Nevada, for example, is 40,000 people and it's not incorporated.
That wasn't the comment.
The comment was that most surgeons in the Netherlands can wait decades before seeing a gunshot wound. If they want hands-on experience, the US is a good place to learn. I think that's a very reasonable comment (EDIT maybe "years" is more reasonable than "decades"...) and if you account for accidents and self-harm, you really don't need to go to Chicago or Baltimore. The vast majority of gun wounds in the US are accidents or self-harm and occur all over the US, including "quiet little towns". I would argue that the real fantasy is to think that the gun violence epidemic is limited to big cities with black guys in hoodies shooting at each other.
Obviously not everywhere in the US has the same rate of gun deaths, but compared to The Netherlands anywhere is high.