It's rare to see an anti-gunner become pro-gun. It's unthinkable to see an anti-gunner remain an anti-gunner while admitting that something pro-gun has actually yielded positive results.

In fairness, we're not that different. While some pro-gun folks turn anti-gun over time--assuming, of course, they were really pro-gun to begin with--most of us don't and almost none of us will buy into the argument that gun control is working for anything positive.

We're just willing to admit that even if it did work, it's still morally wrong to infringe on our rights.

Yet it seems that the Heritage Foundation's Amy Swearer has noted that anti-gunners are admitting that Bruen is working.

Well, sort of, anyway.

Gun control advocates have spent the past two years losing their minds over the Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, a case that affirmed citizens’ right to publicly carry a firearm for self-defense.

One of the commonly repeated criticisms of Bruen has been that the high court’s ruling is dangerous because allowing ordinary peaceable citizens to carry concealed handguns in public would increase rates of gun violence.

In a strange twist of events, some of those same gun control advocates now admit—unintentionally and with no sense of irony—that violent crime rates are actually on the decline in those restrictive gun control states forced by Bruen to recognize the right to bear arms in public.

Giffords, a prominent gun control advocacy organization, previously condemned the Bruendecision as “extremist,” arguing that it would “drastically affect the safety of a large swath of the U.S. population” by “escalating gun violence, leading ever more people to feel unsafe in their own communities.”

Two years later, while retweeting an article that criticizes conservatives for asserting that President Joe Biden’s failed border policies are partially responsible for an increase in crime rates (even though significant evidence suggests that this claim is false), Giffords now highlights a claim that crime rates are actually falling.

So, they're admitting that crime is down, they just won't credit Bruen.

Most anti-gunners will instead credit the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act for the drop in crime, but when you ask them to point to the exact part of the law that is most responsible, they can't.

The BSCA has a lot of aspects, but most of the measures included don't really have a direct impact on your average criminal. There's nothing in there that disarms them nor is there anything to push them from a life of crime into walking the straight and narrow.

So if violent crime is down, why?

Now, I'm not going to say definitively that Bruen is, in fact, the reason violent crime has dropped. I believe it to be, but I can't say that for certain. Crime has complex causes and it's not really easy to narrow down one thing that prevents it.

But we can say, as Swearer notes above, that the doomsaying by people like Giffords really didn't pan out the way they claimed, now did it?

What's more, by pointing out that crime is down, Giffords is tacitly admitting that Bruen didn't do all the horrible things they claimed. They're also at least suggesting the possibility that Bruen may be responsible, at least in part, for the reduction of violent crime.

Whoops.