You wouldn’t know it by listening to the mainstream media, but the rate of violent crimes committed in the United States is at one of its lowest points ever—and has dropped significantly throughout our nation’s history.
According to the FBI’s 2018 “Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report,” released last March, the number of reported violent and property crimes dropped from January-June 2018 compared with the same time in 2017. The FBI’s statistics for 2018, based on reports from 14,509 law-enforcement agencies, are still being complied.
Three types of violent crime—robbery, murder and non-negligent manslaughter, and aggravated assault—were less frequent in the first six months of 2018 against that time a year earlier, the report noted.
- Robberies plummeted 12.5 percent,
- Murder and non-negligent manslaughter offenses dropped 6.7 percent, and
- Aggravated assault offenses dipped by 2.0 percent.
According to the FBI, “Preliminary figures indicate that law enforcement agencies throughout the nation showed an overall decrease of 4.3 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention for the first 6 months of 2018 when compared with figures reported for the same time in 2017,” and murders were down 6.7-percent.
As the 2017 report noted, “The violent crime of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter decreased 0.7 percent in 2017 when compared with the 2016 estimate...The murder rate was 5.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, a 1.4 percent decrease when compared with the estimated rate for the previous year.”
Historically, the overall pattern is even more significant. Writing in June 2010, UC-Berkeley sociology professor Claude Fischer noted in the Berkeley Blog that the long-term U.S. homicide rate—which he dubbed the “most reliable measure of violent crime”—showed a huge decline over the centuries.
Of course, no single factor explains the steady drop in homicide and violent-crime rates. Certainly, better and more policing was (and remains) a factor. The rise in the American living standard and the creation of millions of jobs over the last two centuries has helped, too, making life easier for many who might otherwise have resorted to crimes if they’d been faced with financial hardships.
But, is firearms ownership a factor in decreasing violent crimes? Anti-gunners would have us believe the opposite. They argue, repeatedly, that fewer firearms in the hands of American citizens would result in less violence.
And yet, by all accounts Americans own more firearms than ever before—including the growing numbers of men and women who practice concealed carry. Some estimates put the total number at over 390 million firearms.
So, if the antis were correct, we should see a steady spike in violent crimes—especially with the millions of firearms purchased in the last decade alone.
Yet, in fact, violent crime rates are in decline in the United States.
Ah, there is now a term called “gun crime.”
In 2013, the liberal think tank, the Pew Research Center, admitted that while violent-crime rates were dropping steadily as most Americans then were unaware that gun crime was lower than it was two decades earlier.
Technically, “violent crime” is not a crime committed with a firearm. For its data collection, the FBI has four categories of violent crimes: “murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault,” and these “offenses…involve force or threat of force.”
While many of these crimes do involve the illegal use of firearms, over 25 percent of these offenses are committed with bats, fists, knives and other weapons.
However, that’s not the story propagated by the mainstream media, where violent crimes equal the use of firearms.
Gun-control initiatives are easier when people are scared—scared because they have been told repeatedly that violent crimes are on the increase. Anti-Second Amendment groups and politicians capitalize on these fears with their newest gun-control plans—all of these marketed as “public-safety” initiatives. These attempts to undermine our Second Amendment rights are greatly helped by a mainstream media bent on portraying America as a land of ever-growing violence.
And this same media doesn’t even attempt to tell the story of the tens of thousands of violent crimes stopped or avoided every year by law-abiding firearms owners.
The reality is, if we want people to know the truth about violent crimes and the inverse relationship between the numbers of firearms compared to violent-crime rates, we must tell our fellow citizens ourselves. It’s clear the mainstream media and the anti-gunners will not reveal these truths.
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