Kostas Moros: We’ve Been Running a Real-World Experiment on Guns and Crime

Any move that seeks to restore gun rights is met with opposition, both before it happens and after. It doesn’t matter whether it’s legislation or a judicial opinion that overturns some gun control law; the rhetoric is the same. Gun control advocates claim that more guns will equate to more crime. They even have legions of studies that claim they’re right, though all of them are, at best, epidemiological studies that can’t really control for, well, anything. They just make some correlations and call it definitive.

Except, it’s not.

Writing at Outdoor Wire, the Second Amendment Foundation’s Kostas Moros notes that we’ve been running a far more accurate bit of research, with the real world as our laboratory, and it debunks literally everything the anti-gunners have put out over the years.

The United States is currently experiencing what is likely to be a record-low in homicide, which has occurred at the same time as a massive expansion in firearm carry rights across the country. I have previously written about how those with carry permits almost never commit crime. State-level data proves it, and even gun-skeptical research organizations have recognized that “evidence generally shows that, as a group, [carry permit] license holders are particularly law abiding and rarely are convicted for violent crimes.”

Yet this irrefutable data didn’t stop the usual antigun suspects from predicting doom when the Supreme Court first issued its ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022. There, the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home. Gun control groups angrily claimed that the decision would lead to dramatic increases in violence.

For example, the then-Chief Counsel of Brady, Jonathan Lowy, said that Bruen “is extremist judicial activism at its worst, and Americans may die as a result of what the Court issued in the sanctity of its protected chambers.” John Feinblatt, President of Everytown for Gun Safety, said the Supreme Court chose “to put our communities in even greater danger with gun violence on the rise across the country.” Giffords claimed the ruling would “escalate gun violence,” “spur unlawful militia activity,” “embolden those inclined to vigilante justice,” “increase violence at protests,” and cause “more domestic violence and hate crimes.”

Antigun politicians made similar breathless predictions. Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey claimed Bruen was a dangerous decision that “will make America a less safe country.” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said it “severely undermines public safety not just in New York City, but around the country.” Senator Alex Padilla of California put it more bluntly: “Today’s decision will make our communities less safe, plain and simple.”

Countless other examples abound. I encourage you to follow @2Aupdates if you want to constantly be reminded of all these claims.

We all make incorrect predictions from time to time, but the degree to which opponents of the Second Amendment were wrong is simply astounding.

As we all know, 2025 saw the homicide rate plummet across the nation, just a few years after Bruen was supposed to open the homicidal floodgates and after numerous states enacted constitutional carry.

There are more guns on our city streets, per capita and via raw numbers, than ever before. If the rhetoric were remotely accurate, we should have seen an increase in the murder rate. 

We did not. In fact, it looks like we saw the lowest homicide rate since the FBI started gathering that data back in 1960. 

Moros provides a whole lot more data, which I invite you to go and take a good look at, because yeah, it’s kind of a slam dunk.

The reality is that the research we’ve been force-fed has always been problematic. From cherry-picked data to bizarrely created control groups to many other odd shenanigans, the studies we’ve seen have told us repeatedly that gun control is essential for saving lives, all without a shred of actual proof that wasn’t filtered through layers of anti-gun nonsense.

Any study that showed the opposite was likely squashed in an act of self-censorship because the researcher either didn’t want to hurt the anti-gun cause or because he or she was concerned about the blowback from colleagues.

Here, though, we have the real-world data, and what it shows is that everything they tried to tell us was a lie.

Does it prove that guns save lives? Not necessarily, though I believe they do. However, I’ll also point out that it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t show that, because that’s not what the anti-gunners are discussing. They’re pushing the idea that guns lead to crime, and that’s completely untrue. Everything else is irrelevant.

Game.

Set.

Match.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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