The comments are all 3 years old so im guessing so is the article

No mention of the Black Friday shooting that resulted in one death. (& yes, it occurred in a southern state, I just can't remember which one.)

Why did that make me laugh ...I know folks have suggested we should have cut the south loose when we had the chance … but if we had, they’d have likely killed us by now..

That's because the term "Black Friday" was accidentally translated from the original Hebrew bible to "The Purge" in the Christian version.

Apparently we are supposed to think that since religious behaviors are a few percentage points more prominent in the South, and fights are somewhat more likely in some southern places, then the cause of fighting is religion. It is a flawed way of thinking IMO. In the first place, the South is a vast region containing over one third of the nation’s population. Do people really think they have neatly summed up the South when they throw out that “Bible Belt” moniker? How do you know it’s the religious ones who are doing the fighting? Half the population seldom or never goes to church. Do you think maybe some of them are the ones fighting?

I clicked on that link and then clicked on the Estately.com link which supposedly conducted the study. What I found was an advertisement for a real estate company along with a silly, frivolous piece about levels of interest in Black Friday by state, and one person’s unprofessional attempt to correlate that with crime rates. The correlation is very shaky, and the named states only roughly overlap the South. Even if there were some sort of correlation, what serious use could possibly be made of the information? And there was no reference to religion at all.

If you want to understand criminal behavior don’t look to churches. My impression is that the people prone to criminal acts are not interested in religion. They don’t call themselves atheists—atheists are a select group. They are selfish people who are looking only for gratification of their own selfish desires. There are studies showing that regular church attendees are much less likely to be charged with misdemeanors. So far as felonies, regular church attendees rarely commit felonies and there’s not enough data to even make up a meaningful study.

[google.com]

Isn't that like the 11th commandment,thou shall shop until you drop or go bankrupt??

It figures....