More Guns, Less Crime: FBI Reports Significant Drop in Violent Crime

The Fedeal Bureau of Investigation has released its 2024 data on criminal offenses across the country, showing continued declines in violent crime; including murder. 

While the news is unquestionably good, let’s not forget that many of the folks who are hailing the 2024 crime figures were predicting they’d look very different just a few years ago. 

Flashback: https://t.co/KPA3b28sBE pic.twitter.com/HAp73M10Fd

— Rob Romano (@2Aupdates) August 5, 2025

It wasn’t just anti-gun academics like Abt who were predicting mayhem as the primary outcome of the Bruen decision. Virtually every gun control organization claimed Bruen was going to lead to a huge spike in shootings and murders. More people toting guns would inevitably lead to more violence, or so they asserted. 

Instead, according to the FBI’s figures, violent crime decreased by 3% in 2023, with murders and non-negligent manslaughter declining by more than 11%. 

The newly released data suggests that the decline in violent offenses accelerated in 2024, with a 4.9% drop in violent crime overall and a 14.9% decrease in murders and non-negligent manslaughter cases. As crime analyst Jeff Asher notes, that means that the homicide rate last year was slightly below what it was in 2019; the last year of “normal” crime data before the 2020 pandemic and riots helped lead to a record-setting rise in the violent crime and homicide rates. 

Crime fell in 2024 across every category and population group. Seriously. Crime was down in all seven categories of crime across all 10 population groups that the FBI measures. 

… That murder fell nearly 15 percent should come as no surprise to regular readers of Jeff-alytics. The most recent sample of the Real-Time Crime Index showed a 14.4 percent decline in 2024 from 2023 and both the CDC and Gun Violence Archive pointed to a double-digit percentage point decline as well. That’s the fastest drop in murder ever recorded, eclipsing 2023’s 10 percent decline (which was expectedly revised from a nearly 12 percent decline a bit).

The nation’s murder rate in 2024 of 5 per 100,000 is the lowest recorded since 2015. Murder declined across every population group as reported by the FBI with a 19 percent drop in cities of 1 million or more and a…19 percent drop in cities under 10,000. 

The 2024 data adds confidence that 2025 will feature the lowest murder rate ever recorded. A decline of around 10 percent in 2025 would place this year even with 2014 as the lowest murder rate ever recorded. Any larger decline in 2025 would give this year the “record”. Data from the RTCI puts it at down 20 percent through May. In other words, the odds that 2025 will have the lowest murder rate ever recorded have gone from ‘plausible’ to ‘more likely than not’.

Again, this is fantastic news…and the exact opposite of what the gun control lobby confidentially predicted when the Supreme Court struck down “may issue” concealed carry laws in June, 2022. 

Their excuse for being wrong is that the hundreds of millions of dollars in community violence intervention grants funded by Congress and doled out by the Biden administration had an amazing and immediate impact on violent crime. Even if most of those programs have had a positive impact (and the jury is still very much out on the effect they’ve had), that doesn’t change the fact that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans exercising their right to bear arms today who weren’t doing so in 2022, and the country is still a safer place than it was three years ago. 

Besides, the community gun violence intervention programs don’t involve banning guns, establishing waiting periods, or putting any other new gun laws in place. They might involve enforcing existing gun laws, but primarily these programs are about reducing crime without making arrests, securing convictions, and sending people to prison. I don’t have any problem with things like violence interruptors from a Second Amendment perspective, and I’d much rather see efforts focused on those most likely to commit a violent crime than creating another criminal offense out of our right to keep and bear arms. 

There’s plenty of room to debate why crime is dropping, but it’s an undeniable fact that  we are in the midst of an historic improvement in public safety while “may issue” laws have fallen, the number of permitless carry states has grown, and millions of Americans have embraced their Second Amendment rights. What the gun control lobby described as an impossibility is our reality, and while they’ll never admit they were wrong we should take every opportunity possible to highlight the fact that more guns hasn’t led to more crime. 

Editor’s Note: The radical left will never admit that our Second Amendment rights help keep us safe.

We’re committed to reporting on and exposing the gun control lobby’s policies and schemes to deprive us of those fundamental rights. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.