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June 10, 2025
Surprise, Surprise: Millions More Lawful Gun Owners, Antigun State Govs. Plug Crime ‘Going Down’
A major development over the past five plus years has been the number of new, first-time gun buyers. It’s been a remarkable shift in demographics of who is buying and training with firearms. No longer can the media ignore reality as the American gun owner is dramatically shifting away from the tired stereotype of “pale, stale and male” gun owners “stockpiling” firearms and towards the most diverse gun-owning population in history.
But in some of America’s largest metropolitan areas, in some of the most antigun cities and states in the country, mayors and governors are chest-thumping over a drop in crime rates. However, their claims fall flat with city dwellers who know better, for two major reasons. First, these gun control mayors and governors ignore the millions of new law-abiding gun owners who have chosen to stand up to criminals and keep their families and homes safe and protect their businesses. Second, many of these major cities are not reporting crime data to the national databases keeping track of such trends.
Governors Fumble
All told, more than 26 million Americans have become law-abiding, first-time gun owners since 2020, with minorities – specifically African American women – responsible for large percentages of those purchases. Many of those buyers hail from antigun states and cities, who became fed up with their elected officials’ failures to keep their communities safe from criminals. After all, the Los Angeles Police Department did send out a press release in 2022 telling city residents to “be a good victim” if they found themselves in danger.
These days, a few of the staunchest gun control governors in the country have recently been on media public relations campaigns making smoke-and-mirrors arguments to promote their efforts to improve safety in their cities. Afterall, many of these states have major cities (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles) that saw dramatic spikes in crime since 2020 that included riots, looting, fires and criminal misuse of firearms as calls for defunding the police echoed and George Soros-backed soft-on-crime prosecutors came into office.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul – who remains committed to enacting the strictest gun control measures in the country – recently called attention to “falling crime” in the Empire State.
“Since taking office, my administration has been laser focused on eliminating gun violence and reducing the number of gun-related injuries and fatalities across the state,” Gov. Hochul said in a press release announcing reductions in statewide crime. However, New York State crime data is notoriously misreported and presented misleadingly. In addition, New York City residents would sing a different tune completely. In fact, NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently warned youth crime violence has surged in recent months. The New York Post reported Commissioner Jessica Tisch as having said the number of youth under the age of 18 busted with a gun increased by a whopping 136 percent between 2018 and 2024. What’s of little surprise but of serious concern, the Post also reported, “The NYPD couldn’t immediately provide the exact numbers tied to the percentage increases cited by the commissioner.”
Chicago Rising
It’s no surprise that Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois has run a similar playbook. In 2021, Gov. Pritzker signed into law a sweeping “police reform” bill into law. One of the law’s major policies was to eliminate cash bail, like New York’s, allowing those arrested to return to the streets in little time. Fast forward to today, and the governor is hyperventilating and decrying President Donald Trump’s vows to protect Constitutional rights and get tough on criminals once again.
“Donald Trump is okay if people in Chicago die,” the governor said, adding, “that’s what will happen if we cut violence interruption programs.”
In case there’s a need of reminding, Chicago once instituted an outright handgun ban on law-abiding residents that even the city’s liberal-leaning newspaper said only benefitted criminals.
NSSF is challenging the so-called Illinois Firearm Industry Responsibility Act, which the governor enacted in 2023, that seeks to muzzle firearm manufacturers’ and retailers’ First Amendment right of free commercial speech and to regulate industry members’ commercial conduct in every state in the Union.
Any effort to claim Chicagoans are safer today under the governor’s “leadership” is highly dubious. According to the Chicago Policy Center, “Chicagoans suffered 28,443 violent crimes during 2024, with cases of aggravated assaults rising to the highest levels in two decades, police data shows.”
Missing Data
No matter which antigun state governor is celebrating their own “leadership” to bring crime down in their state and keep residents safe should be taken with a grain of salt and a doubtful eye. That’s because they are all spinning incomplete data to create their own false narrative.
An NPR headline reveals, “The FBI’s new crime report is in, but it’s incomplete.” A report from The State said, “Politicians love to cite crime data. It’s often wrong.” That analysis included a chart demonstrating the “FBI’s national crime stats routinely miss a fifth of local, state agencies.” The Marshall Project published analysis stating “4 Reasons We Should Worry About Missing Crime Data.” And the Franklin Observer published a report as well, titled “Manipulating the truth? The FBI simply does not count the millions of crimes that go unreported.”
Antigun state governors like to tout their “leadership” and push to pass more gun control to keep people safe. But they ignore serious flaws in crime reporting data. They dismissively ignore when law-abiding Americans use a firearm in self-defense to deter a criminal, even when they don’t discharge their firearm. And they dismiss the more than 26 million Americans driven to purchase a gun by the policies enacted by these very same governors and mayors.
If you hear an antigun state governor celebrating a reduction in crime in their state, be very leery.
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Chicago’s Nation-Leading Homicide Streak & Democratic Gun Control Dreams
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