The hypothesis developed was confirmed. The empirical findings strongly suggest that rural areas with a well-developed civic community have significantly lower rates of violent crime. The features of such a community include locally oriented small businesses, an economically independent middle class, residential stability, local investment in home ownership, and civically engaged people and institutions. The test of the theoretical model used U.S. counties and county equivalents as the unit of analysis. Only those counties with less than 25,000 people and a minimum of 1,000 people were selected for the study. Another criterion for selection was the county's reporting of at least 90 percent of their Uniform Crime Report data for 2000-2002. The dependent variable was the sum of the violent crime count for 2000-2002. Eleven primary explanatory variables were identified from the research literature in order to capture measures of residential stability and local investment, the economically independent middle class, locally oriented capitalism, and the level of civic engagement, as well as the institutional structure supporting it. The article cites the sources of data for each of these variables. A variety of potentially confounding factors were controlled, namely, county poverty levels, unemployment, female-headed households, high-school dropouts, the proportion of Blacks in the population, and age structure of the population. 4 tables and 90 references