Dr. John Lott talked to Frank Miniter about the drop in crime rates during 2025.
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If the gun-control Left is to be believed, then the murder rate in the U.S. should be going up, up, up; after all, gun sales and ownership rates have been rising for the last few decades and the anti-gun groups claim that gun ownership is the cause of violent crime.
This, of course, is nonsense. No metric shows that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens increases crime. But, as crime is a complex topic, for answers we reached out to John Lott for this episode of The Armed Citizen Podcast. Lott, of course, is the author of the 1998 classic More Guns, Less Crime and many other books, as well the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
“I think it’s pretty clear we hit historic lows [for the murder rate],” said Lott. “You know, it looks roughly that there was a little bit over a 20 percent drop in murder rates last year. In 2024, it was about five per 100,000. And it looks like there’s a good chance we’ll be below four per 100,000. You know, 3.9 something. The lowest previous murder rate ever recorded in U.S. history was 4.5 per 100,000.
“What people really need to appreciate is the change this represents over what was happening during the Biden years,” said Lott. “The best measure we have of crime is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, which measures total crime. Media normally only focuses on reported crimes to police from the FBI, but only about 43 percent of violent crime, and about 30 percent of property crimes, are reported to the police. If you look at the measure of total violent crime, total felony violent crime increased by 59 percent during the Biden administration. That’s the largest percentage increase that we’ve ever seen. And my guess is when the final data comes out for 2025, which will be out in September, we’re going to see a really huge drop in overall violent crime as well as murder rates this last year.” . . .
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