Violent crime is down sharply nationwide.
Homicide in particular - as noted by the President in his State of the Union, and fact-checked by a newly fact-focused CBS News:
- Preliminary data from independent researchers suggests that homicides may have hit a 125-year low last year, although the FBI's official annual crime report for 2025 will not be released until later this year.
- A January study by the Council on Criminal Justice, or CCJ, found a "strong possibility" that the 2025 homicide rate will drop to about 4 per 100,000 residents, which would be the lowest recorded in law enforcement or public health data dating back to 1900. The homicide rate has been declining since 2022, according to annual FBI reports.
- The CCJ report also noted that the reasons for last year's decline are not clear, but researchers say possible influences include "changes in criminal justice policies and programs, shifts in the use of technology, and broader social, economic, and cultural trends."
And while we're on the subject, Americans have been buying guns. Lots of then
No - lots of them:
Using historical firearm production, import, and export data from the ATF, 24/7 Wall St. calculated the number of guns Americans have bought in each of the last 35 years. For every year between 1986 and 2020, we tallied the number of firearms manufactured in and imported to the U.S. and subtracted the number of firearms exported to foreign markets. Import data is not yet available for 2021 or 2022, and as a result, numbers for these years only reflect estimated domestic sales of American-made firearms. The most striking trend in the last 35 years is the recent surge in gun sales. In the last five years alone, Americans bought nearly 70 million firearms — 13 million more than in the entire first decade of the 2000s, and 17 million more than in the 1990s.
So - as the number of civilian firearms in circulation has exploded, crime has fluctuated - but except for the spike between 2016 and 2022, it is broadly down nationwide, "in spite of" all those guns in circulation.
With one significant exception.
I noted last year that Colorado had just passed some of the most draconian gun laws in the country, certainly outside the coasts.
How's that working out?
About like you'd expect, if you've been paying attention to this issue at all over the past 45 years:
Colorado is a case study for this.
— schotts - U.S. Citizen and Patriot (@schotts) March 15, 2026
Since 2013, progressive democrats have passed 30+ new gun laws while always promising each one will make Colorado safer.
We went from a less than average murder rate in 2012 to the second most dangerous state in 2025.#copolitics #coleg https://t.co/W41qWKFnOx pic.twitter.com/8y75kD6IRF
"But wait", you might say. "Violent crime is down nationwide, including in Colorado".
And you'd be right. And Colorado's Governor Polis is taking a victory lap over the numbers.
But where it gets interesting is buried in the graph in that tweet just above. It compares violent crime rates at the end of the last trough (the dip in violent crime that started in the mid-nineties and ended before the pandemic and the post-pandemic peak in 202) with the same numbers in 2023.
While violent crime nationwide was 8.1% lower after the spike than before it, in Colorado, the same comparison was up 26.2%. Other states that have swung to the left showed similar results (Washington up almost 60%, Minnesota up almost 7%).
Long story short - Colorado has shared in the general nationwide drop in crime numbers. Just not nearly as much.
The numbers over the next two years will be even more interesting. I'll make a note to check back as the longer-term effects become apparent.
