When I was a kid, HBO had a "documentary" in regular rotation called "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" that was all about Nostradamus and his supposedly amazing ability to predict events far into the future. The film, starring a past-his-prime Orson Welles, captivated my younger self, and for years afterwards I was convinced that Nostradamus was the real deal. When I got a little older, I realized that his real gift was his ability to write his predictions as vaguely as possible, which comes in handy when offering up claims of things to come.
The gun control lobby, on the other hand, has been pretty explicit in its own predictions about what would happen here in the United States after the Supreme Court struck down "may issue" licensing laws four years ago in Bruen.
Brady, for instance, declared "it will assuredly result in more gun violence immediately." Gun control activist David Hogg opined that the decision "will kill young people." Then-New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy called Bruen a "dangerous decision will make America a less safe country.”
The Second Amendment Foundation has collected these quotes and dozens more in a new fact sheet that shows just how off-base these predictions have been. Instead of "more gun violence," there's been a 36 percent decline in homicides across the country between 2022 and 2025, and right now it looks like 2026 will see another substantial decline.
The gun control lobby didn't stop making predictions after Bruen, and they're not making them in a vacuum either. As SAF points out:
When they make those predictions, journalists often quote them uncritically in their coverage. For example, in its recent article on the Justice Department declining to seek a stay of a ruling against National Firearms Act registration of suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns, CBS News quoted Giffords Executive Director Emma Brown warning that these items “can now easily get into the wrong hands and be used to harm innocent people.” The article did not tell readers that predictions like this one have repeatedly failed to come true in the past.
The press is quick to quote folks like Emma Brown, Kris Brown of Brady, and the talking heads at Everytown (none of whom have the last name of Brown, which seems like an oversight that should be corrected) when they make these claims of increased danger. SAF is right, though, that none of these media outlets seems eager to revisit these predictions once they've proven to be demonstrably false.
SAF isn't claiming that Bruen or any of the pro-Second Amendment reforms put in place by the Trump administration have directly led to the historic decline in homicides and violent crime that we've seen over the past few years. As the group puts it, "Crime trends have many causes. This document does not argue that any pro-Second Amendment reform caused the decline in violence. It shows that the specific predictions of rising violence did not come true."
With the DOJ's decision to not enforce the NFA's registration requirements for suppressors, short-barreled firearms, and AOWs going forward, the gun control lobby has launched another round of predicting an explosion of violent crime. My own prediction is that they're going to be wrong yet again, and that the mainstream media will continue to studiously ignore their failures as they've done in the past.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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