If you’re a regular reader of Bearing Arms, the record-setting decline in violent crime, including homicides, isn’t surprising. We’ve been covering this trend for months now, and we usually point out that the decrease is happening even though gun control activists predicted violence would soar after the Supreme Court struck down “may issue” carry laws in 2022.
The gun control lobby seems to have largely dropped that talking point in favor of a new one; yes, violent crime is declining, but it’s going to skyrocket just like did in 2020 because President Donald Trump is gutting hundreds of millions of dollars in community violence prevention grants.
Those grants, which were largely funded through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the ipartisan Safer Communities Act, primarily doled out money to state and local governments, who served as passthroughs to non-profit groups ostensibly aimed at reducing violence without policing or incarceration.
The problem with that theory is that those funds have been drying up for months now, and the precipitous decline in violent crime has continued. Anti-gunners are still making those claims, but they’re also shifting their arguments. Over at The Trace, for example, several activists claim that the downward trend in crime means Trump doesn’t need to send in the National Guard to places like Chicago and Memphis… even though the lack of funds for community violence intervention programs supposedly means that crime is about to spike.
The pattern of spike and then a downward trend holds true in the cities the president has called for military intervention in to combat surging violence.
Gun violence is trending downward steeply in Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Oakland. In Portland, despite a recent slight uptick, gun violence is on track to be lower than last year’s totals, after trending down nearly continuously for 86 weeks. New Orleans at one point had 138 consecutive weeks of downward trending gun violence in a row, starting in 2022.
“There’s a really big misconception that our country is run rampant with gun violence, and it’s increasing and everywhere is so dangerous,” said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins. “Overall crime has been trending down for a long time. We saw some places spike during Covid but we’re seeing recovery from those spikes.”
“Some places that are talked about as dangerous didn’t even see spikes,” she said.
Not only are anti-gun academics like Crifasi now belatedly acknowledging the “long time” trend in declining crime, they’re ignoring the fact that those declines are also happening places without the restrictive gun laws they want to see in place. New Orleans, for instance, saw its homicide rate plunge even after permitless carry took effect last year. The same thing happened in Miami, Florida, which had the lowest number of homicides since at least the 1940s in 2024, after permitless carry became the law of the land.
The closest thing we get to an acknowledgement of that fact is this brief mention:
While it is worth noting that cities in the Deep South, for example, tend to have much higher rates of per-capita gun violence than cities in the blue states on the coasts, many of them have seen violence spike and then sharply decline in recent years, just like cities everywhere else.
An accompanying infographic shows the homicide rate in Houston, Dallas, Columbus (Ohio), Jacksonville, Birmingham, and Lexington (Kentucky). All of those cities are in permitless carry states, and the data shows the homicide rates in every one of those cities is lower than it was the year before permitless carry took effect.
Rather than admitting they were wrong about the effects of expanding “shall issue” and permitless carry, activists like Crifasi are just ignoring their own studies that supposedly shows gun-related violence increases dramatically when “may issue” laws were replaced by “shall issue” statutes.
Many of the places that had meaningful reductions in gun violence, saw them because they have made more investments in response to gun violence,” Crifasi said. “ Community violence intervention programs, cleaning and clearing vacant lots, investing in people and places that experience gun violence.”
Cities and counties will have to get creative and step up to ensure funding is available, she said. For example, Oakland, California, recently passed a ballot measure calling for a tax increase to support community violence intervention programs and the police department. Private foundations could also contribute toward sustaining the progress made in so many cities, Crifasi added.
And many cities will receive opioid settlement funds that could tangentially impact gun violence because drugs and gun violence are so intertwined.
“We’re spending money on gun violence already,” Crifasi said. “Just how do we want to spend it? Making our community safe or dealing with violence after it’s happened?”
I’m all in favor of community violence intervention programs that a) operate with transparency and accountability and b) have a proven track record of success, since they don’t involve putting new gun control laws in place. And the Trump administration has restored some funding to these programs, which I see as a good thing.
But the gun control lobby isn’t primarily interested in these initiatives. Fundamentally, their focus remains on putting new laws on the books that make it harder, if not impossible, to exercise our Second Amendment rights. That’s a harder sell when violent crime is declining, but if and when those numbers start to tick up again the anti-2A forces will be beating the drum for more gun laws… and no matter how bad violent crime might get, they’ll still find reasons to object to Trump’s use of the National Guard to combat it.
Read the full article here
