We all heard or saw it.
The Bruen decision came down, shattering “may issue” permitting schemes throughout the nation, and the usual suspects started kvetching. It was the usual rhetoric about “streets running red with blood” and other hysterical nonsense.
They maintained that the crime rate was going to soar, that people were going to be less safe.
Now, several years later, what’s happened?
Well, we’ve all seen the reports about the homicide rate for 2025 being the lowest in quite some time. We know that even the Gun Violence Archive, using its warped definition of “mass shootings,” says those were down, too.
But what about violent crime as a whole?
Well, our friends at The Truth About Guns took a swing at that one.
Again, the naysayers couldn’t have been more wrong. During the period since Bruen, when more Americans have begun carrying a firearm for self-defense, violent crime has dropped dramatically, according to statistics from the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI).
The RTCI is a sample of reported crime data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies nationwide which mimics national crime trends with as little lag and the most accuracy possible. Crime statistics are inexact, but sampling agencies in this way is a proven method for accurately measuring trends while waiting for national crime estimates published each year. Standardizing the offenses collected and time periods measured from hundreds of agencies makes it possible to evaluate trends up or down as they develop.
Note that RTCI tracks a sample using the numbers provided by 570 agencies. However, the relative proportions of the sample are said to track within 2% of the proportions of FBI numbers in the Uniform Crime Report, lending lots of credibility to the numbers.
According to RTCI, as of October 2025, the latest numbers available show the 12-month running average of violent crime has dropped 14% since June 2022, when SCOTUS ruled in the Bruen case. Even more interesting, murders dropped 39% since the ruling, which prompted anti-gun doom and gloom predictions.
Author Mark Chesnut goes on to correctly note that this doesn’t mean Bruen is responsible for the drop, only that the hysterics were incredibly wrong about what would happen following Bruen.
Now, it’s entirely possible, even likely, that the possibility of more armed citizens caused many violent offenders to decide to find less dangerous lines of crime. We just can’t say that definitively. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t want to mimic the anti-gunners who immediately jump on every correlation and declare causation when it’s convenient to their cause.
And we know that if the violent crime rate had gone up, they’d be screaming exactly that.
But the truth is that we don’t have enough hard and fast evidence that takes other potential factors into account. Violent crime is far more complex than some people pretend it is, so we’d need that in order to be accurate.
Especially since some violent crimes don’t involve a firearm at all.
Bruen simply made sure that if someone tries to rob you with a knife, you can make sure they’re the idiot who brought a sharp, pointy thing to a gunfight, and the state couldn’t prevent that because they figured you didn’t need to protect yourself.
More guns, less crime.
Where have we heard that one before?
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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