A Fun Natural Experiment

I recently drove across the country (from Michigan to San Francsico). As a result, I am now an expert on the great American Experiment. One fun thing I noticed while driving through the endless ruralities that constitute the middle of this country was how many towns had exceptionally upbeat names: Paradise, Loveland, etc., etc..

What are the crime rates in these bubbly places? How do they compare to the averages? Most of these places are pretty rural, so we would have to normalize for that, but it would still be a relatively easy exercise. There would be all sorts of fun investigations along these lines we could do, what about gun ownership in Rifle, Colorado?

The hope, or most interesting outcome, would be to see how much an entirely irrelevant factor (the name of a town), affects, subconsciously, the behavior and attitudes of its residents.

Hopefully I get some free time in the near future to do this.