Crime in the city

These points are very true, but I think there's more to it that Steve Chapman discusses:

It's true that crime is much more common in the city than in the country. Is that because the sight of cattle grazing saps felonious impulses, or is it something else? Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks the explanation is pretty simple. "It's a matter of social control," he says. "Small towns have networks of family and friends, and most everyone knows everyone else."

This deters crime in two ways. First, you don't want to damage your reputation among people who may ostracize you for doing wrong. Second, you don't want to rob someone who can easily identify you to police--and in a small town, that limits your pool of victims. Crime is more common in cities because they offer a target-rich environment and much less chance of being spotted by someone who can tell the cops your name, address and 3rd-grade teacher.

Chapman didn't bring up the issue of gun ownership in rural America versus urban America, nor the willingness of the respective populations to use force to stop crime. I would suspect that the odds of a criminal dealing with an armed victim would be meaningfully higher in rural areas, and that there would be a greater willingness to inflict serious, probably deadly, force on the criminal. Furthermore, most rural areas don't place anywhere near as many burdens on victims of crime to prove that they were justified in using a weapon against their attacker; the attack itself is often sufficient evidence that force was justified. This is not the case in many urban parts of the country where it is very dangerous to use a weapon for fear that some overzealous cop or prosecutor will turn you into a criminal for the heinous sin of self-defense. Criminals know all too well that the cops can be just as much of their protectors as their enemies in some urban jurisdictions.

It also doesn't hurt criminals that they are less likely to face a reasonably socially cohesive community that is willing to rally in a meaningful way around a victim as the crime is being committed in an urban environment. Criminals aren't simply emboldened by a target-rich environment, but also because they know that if they act boldly, many people will simply roll over and play dead as they have been taught by anti-gun, anti-self-defense government employees. In a rural community, the odds are much higher that others will come to the aid of a victim, which not only puts the criminal at risk of facing an armed opponent, but also being outnumbered. I don't think this has to be an inherent tendency in urban settings, but urban culture certainly does encourage a more pacifistic approach to dealing with crimes that are happening in plain view against another person.