On Tuesday, Cam noted that Everytown made the idiotic mistake of claiming that the Bruen decision made people in New Jersey less safe and that reality itself debunked the claim.

It's always nice when reality does that.

What's more, it didn't just debunk that claim, either.

You see, over the last couple of years, we've had a couple of very pro-gun things happen. One, of course, has been the Bruen decision which ended "may issue" permitting. Now, everywhere is "shall issue," which we were told would lead to an increase in violence.

The other, which also was supposed to lead to an increase in violence, was a number of states adopting constitutional carry.

The reality? Crime across the nation is down.

New FBI data confirms previous indications that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising.

The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the U.S. population, that provided the FBI with data through December.

“It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who now studies crime trends.

Now, few are attributing this drop in crime to Bruen and constitutional carry.

In fact, they argue there are other reasons entirely.

Asher and other experts say the biggest factor behind the drop in crime may simply be the resumption of anti-crime initiatives by local governments and courts that had stopped during the pandemic.

“After a terrible period of underfunding and understaffing caused by the pandemic, local governments have, by most measures, returned to pre-pandemic levels,” wrote John Roman, a criminologist at the University of Chicago. In an interview, Roman said, “The courts were closed, a lot of cops got sick, a lot of police agencies told their officers not to interact with the public. Teachers were not in schools, not working with kids.”

Of course, Roman does leave out the whole "Defund the Police" movement and how after George Floyd and Jacob Blake, a lot of police officers simply backed off from doing their jobs out of concern they'd be the next to end up on the news and sparking riots.

Yet that's a topic for another day.

What I'm mostly wanting to focus on here is the simple fact that we've seen more and more people carrying guns across the nation throughout 2023 and violent crime, which we were told was going to get so much worse, dropped by six percent.

No, that's not exactly a massive increase and no, that's not remotely below where it was in 2019, but it's also the exact opposite of what people like Everytown, Giffords, and Brady said would happen.

Time after time, anti-gunners claim that some expansion--more properly termed a restoration--of our gun rights will result in more blood in the streets. Time after time, history shows them to have been flat-out wrong.

So here we are, looking at another example, and guess what? They'll still use that tired argument again the next time around. The media will give them air time or column inches and refuse to examine the rhetoric critically. Then, when the fearmongering doesn't pan out, they'll ignore it and pretend the claims never existed.

But we know. History knows as well.