The Trace Calls More Guns, Less Crime a Paradox

The fundamental premise of the gun control lobby is that more guns leads to more crime. So you can imagine the headscratching and befuddlement by gun control activists now that violent crime is dropping dramatically across the country, to the point that 2025 is likely going to have the lowest U.S. homicide rate since the FBI started keeping track back in 1960. 

The Bloomberg-funded website The Trace says 2025 has been a “paradoxical year on the gun violence beat.” We’re still seeing hundreds of thousands of firearms sold each month, even if numbers are well-off their highs from 2020 and 2021, and the Trump administration has pulled back hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to “community violence intervention” programs. Yet violent crime is plunging, which shouldn’t be the case according to the gun control lobby’s foundational principles. So how do they try to explain away this phenomenon?

Experts point to the crackdown on unlawful gun dealers and deep investments in violence intervention as contributors. They also emphasize that even the precipitous drop puts us, basically, where we were before the pandemic — with a broad national gun violence problem. 

Well, hang on a second. The Trace has also informed us that the Trump administration has gutted the ATF’s budget and redirected field investigators to assist ICE in immigration enforcement, leaving gun dealers largely unsupervised. And those “deep investments in violence intervention” have largely dried up, at least at the federal level, according to anti-gun activists. So how could those two factors be the major reasons for the decline in violent crime… a decline that Everytown tries to minimize by claiming that we’re basically just back to where we were six years ago. 

What The Trace neglects to tell its readers is that, before the pandemic, violent crime was at or near 50-year lows across much of the country. The pandemic and the government reaction to it wreaked havoc on our criminal justice system; courts were closed for months, many big cities decided to depopulate jails as much as possible (even to the point of declining arrests in some crimes), and the “Defund the Police” movement exploded in many of those same Democrat strongholds after the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. 

Dems aren’t talking much about scrapping police forces and replacing them with community activists and social workers these days. Court systems are back to their normal level of dysfunction as well, which I’d argue has had a much bigger impact on violent crime than the hundreds of millions of dollars the Biden administration threw at “violence intervention” programs. 

Even if we were to accept The Trace’s explanation for the staggering drop in violent crime, the fact remains that this decline has taken place while hundreds of thousands of firearms are entering the hands of private citizens every month. While permitless carry is the law of the land in 29 states. While exercising the right to carry is achievable in cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore for the first time in… well, ever. 

No matter how hard The Trace tries to obfuscate, more guns is not leading to more crime. More Americans are exercising their right to bear arms, and it isn’t leading to Wild West shootouts. The United States is safer than its been in decades, and without any new federal gun control laws in place. That’s not a paradox. It’s simply proof that the fundamental premise of the gun control lobby is deeply flawed, and that public safety isn’t contingent on stripping us of our Second Amendment rights. 

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