The thing that bothers me the most about The Trace is that while they don’t really try that hard to hide their anti-gun bias, they’re treated like a neutral journalism project by the mainstream media. Somehow, I don’t see the New York Times and Bearing Arms teaming up on anything, but The Trace? Absolutely.
But as we wrap up the year, The Trace decided to take a look at the year in review, and in the process, they kind of deliver the greatest self-own in biased journalism I’ve seen in a long while.
Whenever I pick up the phone and call anyone working in gun violence prevention or gun violence research, the conversation usually starts with a “How are you doing?” followed by the inevitable “Hanging in there.”
That’s because I’m not usually calling to talk about positive news (unless it’s for this newsletter), and 2025 has been a year of setback after setback for gun violence prevention — at least on the federal level. You’ve no doubt read plenty of stories about that, I’m sure, so we’re not going to spend any more time on that here.
Instead, we’re going to spend this edition of The Trajectory looking back on the year and taking stock of the progress. Work on preventing shootings and deaths from guns didn’t stop, and here are just a few of the highlights from 2025.
— Chip
Gun Violence Is at Historic Lows Nationwide
We’d be remiss if we didn’t start with some scene setting. Since 2022, when the COVID-19 spike began to slow, we’ve been documenting one of the sharpest drops in violence in American history. Early on, there was a plausible case that the “great decline” was just a function of how bad the COVID spike was. That is, because violence spiked so much during the pandemic, there was more room for it to fall back down.
But 2025 is showing that the declines we’ve been seeing are not simply a reversion to the mean.
We can pretty confidently say it’s something more than that. Take crime data from the nation’s police departments, for example. It’s early, but it shows that the United States may finish 2025 with one of the lowest — if not the lowest — rates of homicide ever recorded, according to preliminary data from the Real-Time Crime Index.
Now, in fairness, they do try to make the case that while the feds are doing everything wrong, the states and local governments are picking up the slack. That’s BS, though, because the rates are down everywhere, not just in anti-gun states.
So what we have is them going on about how awful everything is, how the White House and Congress are making everything less safe, only to immediately point out we’re looking at what may turn out to be one of the lowest homicide rates ever recorded.
Only people who work for The Trace could write that and not rattle apart physically due to the cognitive dissonance.
Between Bruen and the Trump administration rolling back anti-gun executive orders, coupled with more than half the states having constitutional carry, we were told that violence was coming, that so-called gun deaths would skyrocket, that there would be gunfights in the streets as our cities became the OK Corral.
And none of that happened.
Zero of it.
Instead, despite all their fearmongering, The Trace is forced to lead with one of the lowest homicide rates ever recorded, and depending on how the next couple of weeks go, we could get the lowest ever.
Plus, even their buddies at the Gun Violence Archive are noting a severe reduction in what they call mass shootings, which don’t even require someone to be killed.
In other words, everything they swore was going to happen didn’t, and they put it right there at the top.
It’s glorious.
It’s a self-own by which other self-owns should be judged.
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