A Question They’re Afraid To Ask

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the national homicide rate has dropped to a 125 year low. Rates of other “crimes against others,” such as robbery and theft, are also down.

This is inarguably good news.

The obvious follow-up question is “why.” If the decrease can be causally attributed to a particular policy, then we might want more of that policy. If the decrease can be causally attributed to a cultural shift, then we might laud and encourage more of that shift.

Causality is hard to prove in matters such as this, where there are so many shifting variables. Still, people can hypothesize by pointing out correlations, and thus start dialogues about those hypothetical links. Which is what researchers are doing.

• Some suggest it’s due to more federal funding for law enforcement.

• Some suggest it’s due to more police enforcement.

• Some suggest it’s due to reduced alcohol consumption.

• Some suggest it’s due to people socializing less and spending more time alone. This would include the decrease in dating activity among the young. Many homicides are prompted by “lovers’ quarrels.”

• Some suggest it’s due to the fact that most homicides are bad guy on bad guy, and that the post-COVID spike in homicides took out a lot of would-be murderers.

• Some suggest, at least for the non-homicide crimes, that it’s actually a lower reporting rate by victims, rather than a real drop-off.

• Some suggest it’s due to an aging population. Most homicide offenders are age 18-30.

• Some suggest it’s due to more community outreach programs.

I gleaned these from a couple Internet searches. There are more, of course.

Once again, correlation is not causation, so before anyone suggests that “X is why, let’s do more,” they need to do some homework. However, correlations can reveal that certain trends are not making things worse. If X is happening, and Y is decreasing, we might not be wrong in concluding that X isn’t making Y increase.

This brings me to today’s point.

Guess what I didn’t see suggested as a potential cause for the decrease in homicide rates?

The widespread restoration of gun rights, and in particular the right to carry a gun in public.

In 2002, only Vermont allowed what is called “constitutional carry,” i.e. the right to carry a firearm without a permit. Today, 29 states allow it.

This constitutional carry movement was preceded by the right-to-carry movement, which was a shift from the prevailing “my home state can deny me a carry permit without just cause” to “the state must show cause to deny me a carry permit.” The former is called “may-issue,” the latter “shall-issue.” Prior to 1977, there were 8 shall-issue states, with the rest being may-issue or outright prohibition on civilian concealed carry. In 2022, prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc V Bruen, that number had grown to 42. Since Bruen, the 8 remaning holdouts are required to operate under a shall-issue doctrine, though some are resisting mightily via burdensome processes restrictions. Nevertheless, many thousands of citizens have leapt those hurdles, and now have permits they were previously unable to acquire, despite the Constitution’s overt protection for the right to keep and bear arms.

Gun rights have been on a steady forward march for the last four decades, after several decades of erosion. The number of handguns in the US has grown from about 50M in 1977 to about 250M today. About one American in ten has a concealed carry permit, and since about half the US population now lives in constitutional carry states, where no permit is required, more than one in ten can choose to carry a firearm at any given time.

In sum, there is a correlation between an increase in the freedom to carry a concealed weapon and the decrease in homicides. This mirrors the correlation that emerged after Florida freaked out the chattering classes by kicking off the shall-issue movement in 1987. IIRC, over a hundred thousand permits were issued shortly thereafter. Despite bug-eyed warnings of an impending Wild-West lawlessness, homicide rates dropped in the ensuing years.

Again, I stress that correlation is not causation.

However, we can conclude the contrary - that the opposite isn’t true. Increases in gun ownership and concealed carry aren’t correlating to increases in homicide, which (very likely) means that more guns in (legally entitled) private hands does not make for more homicides

Why are none of the talking heads looking to find causality in the homicide rate decrease bringing gun ownership up?

Because, as is far too often the case nowadays, social scientists (or those who fund them) have agendas and narratives, and those almost invariably point in the direction of greater government control or intervention in our lives. An armed citizenry is anathema to greater control, and a citizenry that can better take care of itself undercuts the argument for more intervention.

For the sake of completeness, I must note that it is possible that the non-gun factors I listed above caused a greater decrease in homicides than whatever increase might have been caused by the proliferation of CCW. But what are the odds of this? How much increase could the other factors mask? I’d say this is more anti-gunner’s fantasy than reality.

And that’s the sad conclusion. The absence of even a suggestion that more guns = less crime, let alone consideration of it as something to be explored, is emblematic of a huge problem in modern scholarship.

Our “expert” class is a giant mess. Driven by a plethora of perverse incentives that have also subsumed the peer review process, research has become incredibly unreliable. Not only has there been a reproducibility problem growing for decades, actual fraud has grown in frequency.

The root of this is a deadly combination of ego, agenda, and funding sources. People who have concluded that they are smarter than the rest of us and that this obligates them to run our lives twist things to justify not just interventions, but their preferred and predetermined interventions. People who have agendas and control pursestrings are not going to favor dispassionate truth over conclusions that advance those agendas. People who want to make a living in a particular field of research are inapt to publish research that contradicts the consensus when doing so would likely cause them to be cast out.

A consensus that aligns with the values of the Best-and-Brightest, and empowers those who would exert their will on the rest of us, becomes a self-perpetuating entity. And the facts be damned. Any contradictory narrative is either ignored, quashed, or marginalized.

So it goes for gun control. So it goes for global warming. So it goes for the vaccine-autism link, which was born of academic fraud but persists to this day. So it goes for countless other assertions we are told “are just common sense” or expected to believe without question.

Is the forward march of gun rights a contributor to the decrease in homicides?

That the talking heads aren’t even asking suggests they fear what the answer might be.