Anti-gun advocates have long held that loosening concealed carry laws would result in rampant violent crime and “blood running in the streets.” So, imaging their furor when John Lott published his book More Guns, Less Crime back in 1998. “How dare Lott write such a travesty?” they decried. “Everyone knows more guns equals more crime.”
Fast forward nearly a quarter century, and gun-ban advocates again threw a fit. When the U.S. Supreme Court passed down its ruling in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, affirming that the Second Amendment protected firearms carried outside the home, gun-haters again predicted gloom and doom.
“Today’s ruling is out of step with the bipartisan majority in Congress that is on the verge of passing significant gun safety legislation, and out of touch with the overwhelming majority of Americans who support gun safety measures,” John Feinblatt, president of so-called Everytown for Gun Safety, said at the time. “Let’s be clear: the Supreme Court got this decision wrong, choosing to put our communities in even greater danger with gun violence on the rise across the country.”
Additionally, Lisa Vicens and Samuel Levander described at Scotusblog.com a future with burgeoning violent crime because of the Bruen ruling.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen will have a detrimental effect on the safety and well-being of New Yorkers and Americans,” Vicens and Levander wrote. “As Justice Stephen Breyer acknowledged, and as we demonstrated in an amicus brief we submitted on behalf of social scientists and public health experts, leading social science research shows that ‘proper cause’ regimes, like the one in New York, lead to lower rates of homicide and violent crime when compared to ‘shall issue’ regimes.”
Again, the naysayers couldn’t have been more wrong. During the period since Bruen, when more Americans have begun carrying a firearm for self-defense, violent crime has dropped dramatically, according to statistics from the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI).
The RTCI is a sample of reported crime data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies nationwide which mimics national crime trends with as little lag and the most accuracy possible. Crime statistics are inexact, but sampling agencies in this way is a proven method for accurately measuring trends while waiting for national crime estimates published each year. Standardizing the offenses collected and time periods measured from hundreds of agencies makes it possible to evaluate trends up or down as they develop.
Note that RTCI tracks a sample using the numbers provided by 570 agencies. However, the relative proportions of the sample are said to track within 2% of the proportions of FBI numbers in the Uniform Crime Report, lending lots of credibility to the numbers.
According to RTCI, as of October 2025, the latest numbers available show the 12-month running average of violent crime has dropped 14% since June 2022, when SCOTUS ruled in the Bruen case. Even more interesting, murders dropped 39% since the ruling, which prompted anti-gun doom and gloom predictions.
Of course, cause and effect are much more difficult to determine than simply looking at some numbers. While we can’t say for sure the increase in concealed carry since the Bruen ruling has caused the reduction in violent crime and murders, we can certainly determine that the increase didn’t cause crime to go up, like the anti-gun advocates claimed—another victory for the principle of more guns, less crime.
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