Anti-gunners love to spout that the U.S. has substantially more guns than people and use this as a bludgeon against the right to keep and bear arms. However, there is undeniable evidence that the nation is becoming safer, even as gun ownership rises.
ABC News recently documented a new study from the Council on Criminal Justice revealing an eye-opening 18% plunge in the nation’s homicide rate for 2026 over 2025 using data from 30 American cities.
Gun rights opponents wrongly equate more firearms with more violence
Not only are numbers for nearly every major violent crime category dropping, but there are an estimated 215 people alive in 2026 who statistically would have been fatalities one year ago.
If this startling trend holds, the nation’s homicide rate will end the year at the lowest level in over a century.
Alan Gelb is the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice. He noted that there is not a single overarching factor to explain the precipitous drop across dozens of cities.
Pandemic spike in violent crime is a fleeting memory
“Murder and other crime rates are falling across the map in cities with different political leadership, different housing and economic conditions, different policing and prosecution and violence reduction strategies, and different levels of federal enforcement activity,” Gelb said.
Among potentially lethal violent crimes, which have certainly not been eradicated, there is a 23% decline in fatal outcomes. There was a small uptick in drug offenses and property crimes such as shoplifting, as anyone on social media can attest.
But the headline is this: In a country where citizens own as many as an estimated 500 million firearms, murder rates continue to race toward a historic low.
The 2020 pandemic and social unrest led to a spike in violent crime, but as more Americans armed themselves and law enforcement rebounded from “defund” efforts, we are a safer society than before Covid became a household word.
Of the dozens of cities studied, only Austin, Minneapolis, Norfolk, and Pittsburgh reported more homicides to this point in 2026 compared to the same period in 2019.
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