Anti-gun activists claim we simply must do something, guns are killing us at an increasing rate. They argue that even if you ignore mass shootings–something they seem pathologically incapable of doing–more and more people are still being killed with firearms. We simply must do something!

Well, there is data collected to see if they’re right. The National Crime Victimization Survey takes a look at all the different ways people are victimized by criminals and compares them to previous years.

It looks like the massive increase in crime only exists in some people’s heads.

2. The NCVS measures crime in various ways: total incidents, total victims (the prevalence) and just “serious” violence.

For all three measures, we see roughly similar patterns: robbery down, other non-rape violence up but weakly, rape up by about 66% to 80%. pic.twitter.com/J6DpbZqCXT

— John Pfaff (@JohnFPfaff) September 10, 2019

* For those unfamiliar with “statistical significance.” It’s a… tricky term. But the basic idea is: if you were to pick ten ppl out of the same pool of 100 ppl several times, the average weight per sample would differ each time, just by chance.

— John Pfaff (@JohnFPfaff) September 10, 2019

There’s more on the Twitter thread, which you should check out if interested, but it looks like there’s no real increase in violent crime. At least, none to speak of.

Jason Pye, over at FreedomWorks, has been compiling a graph of historical firearm victimization, which was updated with this latest data.

A few weeks ago, I tweeted out a chart of firearms victimizations based on reporting from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey. The report for 2018 was released yesterday. I’ve updated the chart to reflect the new report. pic.twitter.com/C19F3kTe7n

— Jason Pye (@pye) September 11, 2019

So it seems that crime isn’t increasing, despite what some claim.

Now, the one except seems to be rape, which is horrific. However, it would be foolish to just assume that the increase in rapes reported corresponded to an increase in rapes occurring. In the post-#MeToo era, it’s not out of line to consider that many of these are simply people who in earlier types wouldn’t have reported the rape at all.

After all, rape is a terrible crime that plays with a person’s psyche in ways that most people can’t really understand. There are a lot of reasons people don’t report rapes, after all. However, there’s also been a lot of talk and a lot of support offered to rape survivors. Perhaps enough so more women are coming forward to admit they were raped.

This is an unmitigated good thing. I’m not going to look at an increase in rape statistics as something to be alarmed by until we know that rapes are reported at similar rates to other violent crimes, then increases.

That said, let’s look at Pye’s chart again:

A few weeks ago, I tweeted out a chart of firearms victimizations based on reporting from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey. The report for 2018 was released yesterday. I’ve updated the chart to reflect the new report. pic.twitter.com/C19F3kTe7n

— Jason Pye (@pye) September 11, 2019

From 1993 to 2018, there’s been a massive dropoff in violent crime according to the NCVS numbers. We’re safer.

It should be noted, though, that during that same timeframe, gun laws have actually been liberalized in most states, especially with regard to concealed and constitutional carry laws. In fact, it’s happened to such a degree that if the claim that more guns equaled more crime held any water, this graph would be a mirror image of itself.

Gun control laws were on the books for decades as violent crime soared throughout the country. Once the American people started reclaiming their Second Amendment rights, though, crime began to drop and continued dropping.

Now, one problem with the NCVS numbers is that it doesn’t include homicides. It’s a survey taken of victims, not just raw data. However, the data that does look at murder rates shows a similar trend (scroll down a bit to see the graph).

In fact, it’s almost like guns aren’t the problem. Shocking, right?

Next thing you know, we’ll find out that gun control activists are wrong on everything else, too.