A New Sheriff Is In Town

by
posted on February 2, 2025
U.S. Capitol with sheriff badge
(Doug Armand/Getty; sheriff’s badge: RedBarnStudio/Getty)

Voters didn’t blame gun owners for the actions of criminals in the last election. Even in California, voters tossed out a lot of officials who blamed law-abiding gun owners for crimes committed by actual criminals.

In Oakland, Calif., a place in which crime has surged since the COVID-19 pandemic, residents reacted with separate recall petitions that ousted Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao (D) and the Alameda County district attorney, Pamela Price (D). Residents who backed the recalls said that Thao created a public-safety crisis by systematically dismantling the Oakland Police Department, and that Price had been letting too many violent criminals walk.

Across the bay in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed (D) was also voted out of office. She was defeated by a challenger with no previous political experience who pledged to “bring accountability back to public safety.” Breed should have seen this coming, as two years ago voters approved the recall of the “poster child for the progressive prosecutors’ movement,” San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D).

Also in California, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón (D), who had allowed a lot of violent felons to go back to preying on law-abiding citizens, was defeated by over a half-million votes. His successful challenger, Nathan Hochman, had campaigned on Gascón’s public-safety failures and promised to end his soft-on-crime policies. “It’s time to stop playing politics with people’s lives. It’s time we had a DA who fights for victims—not criminals,” said Hochman.  

The downfall of so many prominent anti-gun progressives was a long-overdue day of reckoning. It is likely too soon to expect a similar enlightenment to occur with respect to the state’s gun laws, but it is a welcome indicator of what happens when residents demand public safety, political accountability and law and order.

Indeed, voters did similar things in other parts of the nation, with a clear majority sending President Donald Trump (R) back to the White House. Crime and public safety were big issues in the last election, as many voted for law and order and their freedom. 

The Narratives Have Shifted
Still, the spin on crime and issues related to our right to keep and bear arms hasn’t just been coming from mainstream-media outlets.

Not long before last November’s election, the FBI quietly released revised numbers that reveal that, rather than decreasing by 2.1%, violent crime in 2022 had actually increased by 4.5%. This eviscerated a talking point presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D) was wielding—and that the legacy media was using as a fact-check tool—to claim that the Biden-Harris administration, presumably thanks to its policies, had overseen a drop in violent crime.

If the FBI had released the updated figures earlier, or had at least sent out a press release explaining why it was adjusting the numbers, they might have saved some face. Instead, the FBI tried to quietly tweak the record, and the media, which was then defending and creating positive narratives for Harris, barely touched the story.

This is a critical point in an age in which federal agencies have too often played politics with data, and a time in which “lawfare” and the “weaponization” of government agencies against those whose politics the administration opposes have been a growing concern.

FBI building
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is located in Washington, D.C. The FBI also has 56 field offices in the United States and Puerto Rico. (Dora Dalton/Getty)


The person who noticed the quiet change to the crime data was John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). His research showed that the adjustments represented a net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes in 2022, including 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies and 37,091 more aggravated assaults. Those are obviously important figures to the 1,699 people who were murdered, the 7,780 raped and so on.

“A major weakness for reported crime data is that most crimes aren’t reported to the police,” Lott said in a report on the revised statistics. “Murder has the advantage because the vast majority of murders are reported. But the revised data for 2021 and 2022 shows a net increase of 1,699 more murders. How do you miss 1,699 murders?”

In an October 2024 report posted at RealClearInvestigations (RCI), Lott wrote that even three weeks after the revised numbers were released, the FBI hadn’t bothered to explain—or even acknowledge—the significant change.

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” said Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, makes it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

Moody also noted that nobody in the mainstream media reported on the important story about the increase.

“With the media using the 2022 FBI data to tell us for a year that crime was falling, it is disappointing that there are no news articles correcting that misimpression,” Moody told RCI. “We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.”

That fact was hammered home by an October report by CBS News claiming to “fact check” both Trump and Harris on their violent crime claims.

“Crime researchers tell CBS News that while both are valuable metrics, the FBI data Harris cites is more reliable, and she is correct that it suggests violent crime is at a near 50-year low,” the report stated, completely ignoring how those FBI statistics had been revised three weeks earlier.

The “fact check” also stated that “Harris’ claim that violent crime dropped to a ‘near 50-year low’ is accurate. But again, using the FBI’s revised statistics—which CBS apparently chose to ignore—that claim would quickly be shown to be patently false.

Even with the revised data, the FBI numbers likely underreport violent crime. One of the problems with the FBI data is that not all police agencies report crimes to the FBI; in fact, many stopped doing so in 2021 and 2022. This greatly skews the numbers. Prior to 2021, about 97% of police departments around the nation reported their crime data to the FBI; however, in 2021, 37% of police departments didn’t report their data. And in 2022, 31% of police departments, including those in big cities like New York City and Los Angeles, weren’t reporting their data to the FBI. Consequently, crime numbers appeared to be substantially lower than they really were.

For these reasons—and many more—President Donald Trump’s team said in these pages last November: “There are many great agents at the FBI, but decisions on everything from whom to bring criminal charges against to whom to promote within the agency to even the data produced by the FBI have become much too political. The FBI can’t function effectively if Americans think their decisions are political. A new, nonpolitical culture must be created within the agency. To do that, someone willing to clean out many of those on the 7th floor must be appointed to run the agency.”

Stopping Actual Criminals
Regardless of how federal authorities and the press want to spin it, the data also show that “good-guy-with-a-gun” policies work a lot more than some would have us believe.

The FBI defines an “active shooter” as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. It does not include incidences of “other” criminal activity, such as gang warfare or a robbery. According to FBI data, armed citizens stopped 14 of 350 “active-shooter” incidents between 2014 and 2023, or 4%. While that is no small thing—and who knows how many precious lives were saved in these cases alone—those numbers don’t exactly reflect reality.

A recent analysis by CPRC found a total of 515 “active-shooter” incidents throughout this period, with armed citizens halting at least 180 (or 35%) of them. The research also found that if “active-shooter” events in gun-free zones are omitted from the assessment, armed citizens stopped more than half (51.5%) of these violent crimes.

Additionally, there were 28 instances in which armed civilians stopped armed attacks, even though the attackers didn’t fire a gun. These cases were not included in the CPRC’s analysis, but it could be argued they prevented homicides.

Moreover, the CPRC report attributes this discrepancy to misclassified shootings and overlooked incidents; for example, the FBI mistakenly categorized five shootings as not stopped by armed citizens, even though armed citizens confronted the attackers and caused them to flee. In some cases, the FBI misidentified armed civilians as security personnel and failed to report citizen engagement in another incident.

ATF headquarters
The headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is located in Washington, D.C. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)


Meanwhile, the legacy media outlets frequently ignore the instances in which armed citizens stop criminals. Nevertheless, the CPRC’s analysis, which is based on media reports, indicates that armed citizens are effective in preventing such tragedies; despite their own reporting, many news outlets chose to use the underreported FBI numbers to create a false narrative about the effectiveness of armed citizens.

As Lott said, “Gun-control advocates keep claiming that good guys with guns are not effective at stopping mass shootings, but it only looks that way if we rely on the news media and the government for crime data.”

“Records of media reports that I have compiled since the beginning of 2021 show police have noted 33 cases in which a concealed handgun permit holder stopped what appeared to be a mass murder in the making,” said Lott. “But few of these heroic cases have gotten national news attention.”

One typically has to turn to local news stations rather than legacy national outlets for these accounts. Nonetheless, there are plenty of examples of armed citizens intervening when you look below the surface. In one example, in June 2023, an armed citizen in Las Vegas stopped a bad guy who had opened fire in a residential neighborhood. The criminal had already injured several people when the civilian, legally carrying a firearm, confronted and shot the attacker, preventing further casualties.

Stopping the War on the Police
So, a real look at the statistics makes it clear that violent crime was worse during the Biden administration than the media and the FBI wanted to admit; also, armed citizens are an important tool that can help stop active murderers, but the actual number of bad guys stopped by armed citizens has been suppressed.

Meanwhile, since 2020, the far Left has also blamed the police for crime and, from New York City to Minneapolis to Los Angeles, they were able to cut police department budgets; as a result, a lot of police officers were demoralized as, in some jurisdictions, George Soros-backed district attorneys compounded the problem by letting violent criminals go free right after police officers risked their lives to catch them.

On this topic, in an interview with this magazine, Trump’s team said, “President Trump will have an Attorney General who will stop the weaponization of government against lawful gun ownership and who will prioritize traditional law enforcement of catching and punishing criminals.”

In this way, instead of weaponizing federal agencies, such as the ATF, against law-abiding gun owners, retailers and manufacturers, as the Biden administration did, President Trump has promised to nominate officials who will focus their agency’s resources on criminals in our society.

Trump has also long supported allowing the lawfully armed citizen’s right to carry for self-defense and he has said he would sign national-reciprocity legislation, so that citizens who can legally carry can carry concealed where it is legal to do so in other states.

Overall, the Trump administration has indicated it intends to take the political spin out of the data being aggregated and published by federal law-enforcement agencies and will task U.S. attorneys with going after actual criminals.

The details will matter with this massive course correction in the U.S. justice system; as a result, look to future issues for more in-depth reporting on crime, law-enforcement and our freedom.

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