Violent Crime is Falling
Violent crime is at near historic lows in the United States even as gun sales and gun ownership increases.
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Unfortunately, violent crime is rising in Haiti:
Despite having a “gun epidemic” (according to the CDC) and increases in gun sales in the United States, the homicide rate has dropped since the early 1990s to near historic lows in the mid-2010s, a decade after the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban sunset in 2004. Both CDC and FBI data verify this. There was an uptick in violence from these historic lows during the pandemic, which has since reversed.
New data from early 2024 shows this prediction of declining rates of violent crime was true. All of this occurred as gun ownership and the number of firearms in circulation increased and while most proposed gun control schemes (such as for the AR-15) remain unpassed.
The projected outcome:
And here’s what happened.
All of this occurred during increased gun sales.
The Murder Rate Is Suddenly Falling
by Jeff Asher, The Atlantic
Jeff Asher is a crime analyst based in New Orleans and co-founder of AH Datalytics.
Official crime statistics are only released after a substantial delay, so for nearly a decade I’ve collected and compiled big-city crime data as a way to assemble a more real-time picture of national murder trends. And this spring, I’ve found something that I’ve never seen before and that probably has not happened in decades: strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate.
The United States may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded, according to my preliminary data. It is still early in the year and the trend could change over the second half of the year, but data from a sufficiently large sample of big cities have typically been a good predictor of the year-end national change in murder, even after only five months.
Murder is down 13 percent in New York City, and shootings are down 25 percent, relative to last year as of late May. Murder is down more than 20 percent in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. And, most significantly, murder is down 30 percent—30 percent!—or more in Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Little Rock, Arkansas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and others.
Explaining the trend is much more difficult than describing it. The cause of the Great Crime Decline of the 1990s, when murder fell 37 percent over six years, is still not fully understood, so any explanations of the current trend must remain in the hypothesis phase for now.
Additional Information
The vast majority of firearms-related homicides are with illegal handguns (88.3% from a CDC study conducted during the Obama administration, 93% according to the BATFE, and 94% according to the Crime Prevention Research Center) and not by legally owned handguns or rifles. These crimes can never be affected by changes in legislation, old or new.
Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). (Copy-pasted from p26-27 of Obama's 2013 "Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence ")
About 200,000 rapes and sexual assaults are prevented each year by guns. If you look up the source they cite in the Northwestern University Law Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology study “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun” (citing tables 2-3 in particular), the numbers check out: If 2.6 million incidents involve the defensive use of a gun and 8.3% of those incidents involve rape or sexual assault (as table 3 lists), then the math checks out - that's just over 200,000 incidents of rape or sexual assault prevented by gun use. See also, The Impact of Victim Self Protection on Rape Completion and Injury
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Are the handguns actually illegal, or was the murderer not able to legally possess one?