The anti-gunners really want us to think of violent crime as an epidemic and treat it like a public health crisis. There are a couple of reasons why they're not entirely wrong. To some degree, a lot of the violence we see looks "contagious." Someone gets shot, and that starts a series of dominoes falling that results in a lot more bloodshed.
But the problem has always been that people are still making the decision, unlike a virus or bacteria that simply exists to reproduce and has no real volition of its own.
In truth, treating so-called gun violence as a public health situation is nothing more than a power grab. We saw what people were willing to give up during COVID, and we saw what Gov. Michelle Lujan Gresham was willing to do in Albuquerque in the name of "public health." She was never alone, just ahead of the curve.
Unfortunately for all of them, the current facts about so-called gun violence are rather inconvenient.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s Surgeon General, declared gun violence to be a public health crisis in June 2024. The control freaks and ban fans natter on endlessly about some “epidemic of gun violence” that will never end unless we pass an assault weapons ban or close the equally imaginary “gun show loophole.”
Like a flock of lobotomized parrots, the media faithfully spreads the word.
Fortunately for all of us, facts often run roughshod over propaganda.
“When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”
That’s from Crime Trends in U.S. Cities, the Council on Criminal Justice’s (CCJ) annual report based on offense data for selected American cities and the nation in 2025.
The FBI’s most recent statistics back up the council’s predictions. According to the agency’s Crime Data Explorer, murder is down by nearly 18%.
CCJ also reported a steep year-over-year decline in homicides across its sample of major cities. As a group, they reported there were 954 fewer murders, a reduction of about 20% from 2024 to 2025.
This should be fairly big news. After four years of sackcloth and ashes, wailing and weeping about a very transitory spike in the homicide rate, the CCJ report is blue skies and sunshine.
Of course, they're not.
Gun control groups are using inflated mass shooting numbers to make it look like everything is horrible, even if those numbers are still down compared to previous years. The rhetoric from the anti-gun groups hasn't changed, nor will it. They exist for the cause, and t hat means making the cause seem all-important. That means framing things whoever they can to make it look like we're all doomed.
What we've had since the Bruen decision is the greatest real-world experiment on gun rights we've ever seen. Numerous "may issue" states suddenly had to start giving permits to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that could meet clear, non-arbitrary requirements, and that was a whole lot of people. While carry-killer bills proliferated, the truth was that we still saw more guns on the streets in private hands than ever before.
And guess what happened?
Violent crime dropped. Homicides dropped. Rapes dropped. Everything went down.
This despite the very clear rhetoric from the anti-gunners that the opposite would happen, that the Supreme Court just made the country less safe.
Now, they're trying to spin this as nothing more than a correction from the highs of 2020 when COVID and riots created a pressure cooker that resulted in a massive spike in homicides.
Funny how no such correction got mentioned back then, though. There was nary a peep noting that such a spike was unlikely to be sustained, and while we should still be concerned about it, there was no reason to believe it would continue on those levels. No such thing every came up, because remember, I was right here, writing about all of it.
We see an expansion of gun rights, though, and everything falls and now it's just a correction.
Frankly, I don't care what they try to call it. I've tried to be fair and not that we can't reach a definitive conclusion simply because of a correlation of expanded gun rights and the homicide rate dropping. I'll stand by that, because that's kind of how this sort of thing is.
But I'm not going to pretend that what they claimed would happen didn't. I'm not going to turn a blind eye to their hysteria simply shifting gears and pretending the good news isn't happening simply because it's inconvenient to their cause. I'm not going to give them a pass over any of it.
The actual facts are inconvenient to their cause.
So, they're just going to try and find new ones that will help.
