Establishment media is all abuzz about how homicides in the U.S. plummeted last year by more than 20 percent from the previous year—the single-largest one-year drop on record, according to CBS News—while overlooking the fact this happened at a time when American gun ownership is at its highest level, ever.
Back on Jan. 15, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported, based on 2023 data, “The estimated total number of firearms in civilian possession from 1990–2023 is 506.1 million (emphasis added),” and the smart money would bet on there being millions more now.
The announcement coincided with the 2025 Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas, where even more firearms commerce occurred and scores of new firearms were introduced, which will result in even more sales in 2026.
This raises an important question: How are the gun prohibition lobbying groups, even with the backing of billionaires who can buy lots of slick publicity, going to talk their way out of this?
After all, for decades anti-gunners have declared repeatedly—and found themselves immediately and unquestionably quoted by the very same press establishment now bragging up the reduced murder figures—that more guns in private hands would guarantee more blood in the streets.
The Crime Prevention Research Center reported in December the latest figures on active concealed carry licenses and permits hover at approximately 20.88 million. This doesn’t count the millions of unlicensed citizens now legally carrying in 29 states which have adopted what is generically called “Constitutional Carry.”
The Supreme Court appears poised to hand down a ruling on concealed carry sometime this summer which could throw “sensitive places” restrictions in the trash.
As Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms observed last October—quoted in an Ammoland report at the time—in reaction to a story in the anti-gun Trace, ““For a couple of generations, we have seen one gun control myth after another used as excuses to restrict our Second Amendment rights. Yet here we are, at a time when those rights are being gradually restored, when states have adopted Constitutional Carry laws, more people own guns and more people are legally carrying them for personal protection, and The Trace acknowledges violent crime involving guns is declining. Looks like we’ve been right all along, and the anti-gun media essentially just admitted it.”
The New York Times, which has been traditionally unfriendly to the Second Amendment while vigorously defending the First Amendment, noted in its report on the crime situation, “The analysis of data from 40 cities, by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, found across-the-board decreases in crime last year compared to 2019: 25 percent fewer homicides, 13 percent fewer shootings and 29 percent fewer carjackings. Between 2024 and 2025, only drug crimes went in the wrong direction, but they were still lower than in 2019.”
The Times, like CBS News and other “legacy media” giants, also carefully ignored the logistically impossible—if one were to believe Everytown and Giffords and Brady—situation now at hand. Somewhere north of a half-billion firearms are privately owned in the U.S., and yet murders have dramatically declined during the first year of the second Donald Trump administration, which has been portrayed by the gun control crowd as dangerously loosening firearms regulations.
One look at the Everytown for Gun Safety Facebook page acquaints viewers with all that’s necessary to know about the gun prohibition lobbying effort. One message which just might underscore the emptiness of this group’s rhetoric states, “Applications for silencers and other weapons regulated by the National Firearms Act increased by a staggering 5,900% the first day that Trump’s $200 tax cut on these deadly weapons went into effect.”
A look around the landscape does not reveal oceans of blood flowing into storm drains as a result. And still, Everytown and its allies avoid the fact that violent crime has dropped at the same time gun ownership, and evidently applications for suppressors, has soared.
Nobody is talking about the real story behind what The Hill revealed the other day: “The average homicide rate, measured per 100,000 residents, in the 35 cities was 10.4 in 2025, down from 13.2 in 2024, 15.9 in 2023 and 17.7 in 2022. The rate peaked at 18.6 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2021, up from 18 in 2020, 13.9 in 2019 and 12.9 in 2018, per the study.” Why isn’t the media quoting NSSF-adjusted data from the National Instant Check System (NICS) which has shown consistent counts of more than a million gun-related background checks per month over the past several years?
Decades ago, the false prophecy opera included predictions of another ice age by now. Then the world would run out of oil. And more guns in the hands of honest, law-abiding citizens would turn the U.S. into the Killing Fields.
We haven’t frozen. We’re still pumping oil. And we have more guns than we did 25 years ago. Perhaps the establishment media ought to start asking the embarrassing questions, and demand more than word salad for the answers.
Urban Crime Spike “the Most Overlooked U.S. Crime Story in Recent Years”
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
I seem to recall the government having a count of about 1.3 to 1.5 billion a year ago but they claimed it wasn’t for tracking purposes. There was supposed to be a lawsuit to get the list destroyed but I never heard if they won, lost or if it is still pending. In addition, I have stated in the past and it is true according to what I have observed and that is that there is less crime when the economy is doing good which usually means that a republican is in charge because they are not raising taxes and… Read more »