After the Supreme Court handed down the Bruen decision in 2022, gun control activists predicted that violent crime, including mass shootings, would increase as “may issue” permitting regimes were replaced with “shall issue” licensing systems. According to official crime statistics from the FBI, that hasn’t happened, and as criminologist James Alan Fox recently opined at the Washington Post, public mass shootings in particular have declined dramatically this year; just four shootings in the United States in which four or more victims died compared to eleven at this point in 2024, which Fox says is the smallest number since at least 2006.
This is terrible news for the fearmongering gun control lobby, but in a letter to the editors of the Washington Post, Everytown for Gun Safety president Nick Suplina tried his best to spin away the statistics and keep fear alive.
This decline is not a happy accident: It’s the direct result of over a decade of tireless advocacy leading to historic progress, such as the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, and improvements to state laws across the nation. These reforms have contributed to what was likely the sharpest single-year homicide decrease in our recorded history.
While Suplina credits the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and unnamed “improvements to state laws”, he ignores the additional states that have adopted permitless carry over the past few years and seen their crime rates decline dramatically. In Alabama, for instance, homicides in Birmingham have dropped by 42% this year, despite Mayor Randall Woodfin’s claim that the state’s permitless carry law led to an historic increase in murders in 2024.
Louisiana also adopted permitless carry in 2024, and homicides in New Orleans have dropped 21% compared to the same time period in 2024. Other cities in permitless carry states that have seen double-digit decreases in their homicide rates include St. Louis (down 43.9%), Dallas (down 34%), Louisville (down 33%), Phoenix (down 33%), and Memphis (down 12.5%). According to the anti-gunners, these cities should be in the midst of skyrocketing murder rates, but we’re seeing the opposite instead.
While Suplina might want to credit the BSCA for the substantial decrease in homicides, according to the gun control lobby itself the DOJ only prosecuted 500 individuals under the new statutes in the first two years that the gun control laws were in place, and most of those cases involved alleged gun trafficking, not violent offenses. But the anti-gunners are also claiming that Joe Biden’s war on the firearms industry and American gun owners has led to the historic declines in homicide, and they’re sounding the alarm about the Trump administration’s reversal of many of those policies.
And some of the most important advances that have contributed to the decline in shootings are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration: In its first 100 days, it has disbanded the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, cut funding for community violence intervention groups and mental health resources, disbanded a key gun violence data center at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and threatened to reverse several lifesaving firearms rules.
This is no time to rest on laurels or engage in academic deflection like, “what goes up eventually comes down.” Instead, it’s a moment to keep going.
Yes, keep going in undoing the unlawful and unnecessary attacks on the right to keep and bear arms. I will say that some community violence intervention projects with a proven track record of success and that have no impact on lawful gun owners should continue to be funded through DOJ grants when appropriate, but dismantling the CDC’s pro-gun control data center and shuttering the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention are big steps in the right direction, along with the DOJ’s newfound interest in protecting the right to keep and bear arms through the use of the Civil Rights Division.
The pro-2A policies enacted during Trump’s first few months in office are helping to make America safe again, but the anti-gunners can’t admit that. Instead, they’ll ignore the falling homicide rates in Second Amendment-friendly states (along with the rise in homicides in gun-controlled Oakland, California) while pretending that the only way to improve public safety is by enacting further restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms; a lie completely discredit by what’s actually happening in city after city across the United States this year.
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