Back in the olden days — the 1990s — violent crime in America peaked in about 1992, then began a steady, decades-long decline. Aside from a man-made spike thanks to the George Floyd/defund-the-police/”restorative justice” blip in 2020/2021 (which some of us are still dealing with), America hasn’t seem crime rates this low in a century outside of a few blue urban enclaves that carefully cultivate their own special environments where crime is actively tolerated, if not encouraged.
So when violent crime rates started to fall after about 1992, people took note of the change in course. One of those people was New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield. In 1997, he wrote an article entitled, Punitive Damages; Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling. This great work of jernalizm started like this:
IT has become a comforting story: for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder.
So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up? Last year, it reached almost 1.7 million, up about seven percent a year since 1990.
The question is not merely a trick quiz, because the costs of running America’s constantly expanding prison system — now more than $30 billion a year — have begun to impose an enormous burden on state governments.
Butterfield couldn’t help but clutch his pearls over the mystifying paradox of society paying the cost to incarcerate so many criminals while crime was falling. It apparently never occurred to the Harvard graduate that crime had been falling precisely because those people were behind bars.
You can be sure, however, that many of his readers saw the (staggeringly obvious) relationship between bad guys behind bars and safer streets across the fruited plain.
In the years that followed, he took a well-deserved, constant ration of shit from those who saw no paradox at all between less crime and higher prison populations. It resulted in the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto coining a term for a failure to recognize such staggeringly obvious relationships.
He (along with Michael Graham) called this the Butterfield Effect. It’s a syndrome that seems to afflict many in the media who fail to (or won’t) see obvious correlations that manage to hit the rest of us right between the eyes.
The latest manifestation of the Butterfield Effect kicking in comes to us from our good friends at Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun agitprop outlet, The Trace, where Aaron Mendelson has written this classic: By the Numbers: Shootings Decrease, But Gun Sales Are Up.
Quoting numbers from the frequently discredited Gun Violence Archive, Mendelson notes that . . .
Shooting deaths and injuries remain at historic lows in the United States, continuing the trend seen in Q1 and in recent years.
Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows 6,458 shooting deaths, and 11,781 shooting injuries in the first six months of the year. Both represent the lowest number since 2015.
That’s good news, of course, and something many of us have noticed. But it baffled Mendelson, so he consulted…an expert . . .
As crime data analyst Jeff Asher told The Trace in May, there are several dimensions to consider:
One, it’s happening everywhere, so it’s probably not local factors.
Two, it happened at a time of decreased police presence. We have fewer officers everywhere.
Three, it happened at a time when we haven’t solved the root causes of crime. It’s not like we fixed poverty and education. Those are still obviously major issues.
Four, the country is still awash in guns. Gun sales are still at elevated levels.
Five, there hasn’t been some major breakthrough in policing efficiency. Clearance rates plunged in 2020. Now they’re rising again, but that probably has more to do with the fact that murder is falling than anything else.
About those guns . . .
An estimated 7.3 million firearms have been sold in the United States — about 4.5 million handguns and another 2.8 million long guns. That would be enough to arm every single resident of Tennessee.
The numbers represent a 2.7 percent increase in gun sales through six months compared to 2025. This marks the first time in six years that we’ve seen an increase in sales.
While the uptick is notable, the raw total is still lower than any year from 2020 to 2024.
But like Butterfield before him, The Trace’s Mendelson doesn’t (or refuses to) see the possibility that the expansion of gun ownership in America — along with making it far easier to carry one legally — might be at least a contributing factor in the historic reduction in crime.
As the old saying goes, an armed society is a polite society. Not only have gun sales expanded significantly in the post-COVID/Floyd era, but the number of states that have eliminated any barrier at all to carrying a gun has expanded to 29. Add to that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that delivered a body blow to some of the worst Bruen-inspired carry barriers.
But seeing a relationship between more guns and less crime — as some have for years — doesn’t come easy for those who toil in Master Bloombergs fields of hoplophobic hype. In fact, even pointing out such a possibility could be hazardous to your economic health (employment-wise).
But on the plust side, this is what results in such lulz-worthy, Butterfieldian analyses that fail to acknowledge the gun-toting elephant in the room. So it’s a win-win. We’ll just continue to ridicule laugh at them when they publish this stuff.
More guns = less crime is nice and all but not really worth much outside of correlation.
What is more valuable and provable is more guns != more crime.
Especially when factoring in those “enlightened” nations that have tried their darndest to ban guns.
Leading to the conclusions that such measures are a)useless virtue signaling to buy the votes of morons or b)the intentional disarmament of a population that may wish to oppose a growing oppressive state.
Probably both.
“But like Butterfield before him, The Trace’s Mendelson doesn’t (or refuses to) see the possibility that the expansion of gun ownership in America — along with making it far easier to carry one legally — might be at least a contributing factor in the historic reduction in crime.”
“expansion of gun ownership in America — along with making it far easier to carry one legally” IS “a contributing factor in the historic reduction in crime.”
‘contributing factors’ for stuff are often ignored and not quantified because the effect of the factor, although present, is not [explored to be] clearly defined or known in clear quantifiable terms or is simply ignored thus not addressed. All anti-gun studies use this to their advantage by leaving out ‘confounding variables’ and other things to bias the conclusion.
A real life story about contributing factors – basically: We used to live in a very crime ridden section of democrat governance hell. It wasn’t always that way, when we first built our home in that unincorporated area, along with many others, it was nice, peaceful. But it was also near the state line and right across the state line was a city eaten up with criminal gangs. So it came to pass that democrats seized control of the county commission and governance, and one of their goals was to ‘racially balance’ the county because some way or another there wasn’t enough black people and this was racist ’cause ‘white privilege’. Now keep in mind here, before the democrats, while under republican governance, the county already had a ratio of 2 black people for every white person, 2:1 and the average black person annual income in the county was greater than $75,000.00, we had like maybe a dozen family’s county wide that were on some form of public assistance. We didn’t really have any crime to speak of in the county maybe some car thefts occasionally and sometimes an assault here and there when people got mad at someone else and and some general rowdiness and arguments resulting in arrest and no one had been raped or murdered in the county for many years and there was like one robbery or home invasion like once a year and the victims never got harmed seriously but sometimes pushed around a little. But, the now completely democrat county governance decided the county needed ‘low income housing’ for all these black people they wanted to ‘racially balance’ the county with. So with their influence at state level managed to dedicate some county land in our area to ‘low income housing’ and it got built. We had everything we needed locally in our unincorporated area – we had nice homes, peace, no crime issue really overall, grocery store, convenience stores, shopping areas, and anything else we needed we could go to the city next door (in our own state, not across the state line). But we did not have our own police department and relied on the county sheriff, had a volunteer fire department – our family’s were safe, woman and children of any race could be out in public and they were safe. Homes in our area, the newer ones like when we built, started at $300,000.00 for smaller homes and our area but the area was racially mixed for the homes in the area. I guess you could say that overall our area was ‘affluent’ but was racially mixed – the democrat county governance could not stand this, surely this was evidence of ‘white privilege’ and ‘wealth hording’ and those black home owners being ‘uncle toms’ – so the democrat county government decided that our area was the perfect place for ‘low income housing’ .
Yeah, well, the gangs across the state line in that city, another democrat strong hold, decided they needed ‘low income housing’ they were being invited to inhabit as if the ‘low income housing’ they inhabited across the state line was no longer suitable for them. And the democrat county governance specifically encouraged them to move in – and before long our crime rate went sky high. Robberies and home invasions became common, rapes and assault and even some murder, people assaulted in their own front yards, gang graffiti appeared all over the place, it got so bad at one point that even the post office stopped delivering every day and went to a once a week delivery and then had a fire team of U.S. Marshalls in a trail car, UPS and Fed EX stopped delivering and we would need to travel 30 miles to a pick up spot at a store to get our packages. We joked about ‘if you go grocery shopping then take a fire team with you’ but it was a dark and grim joke because it was reality that one might want to consider actually doing that – the gangs staked out any shopping areas. We had a ‘may issue’ regime at the time and it was difficult to impossible to get a carry or ownership permit. This was all before constitutional carry and ‘shall issue’ came to the state, and before we could rid ourselves of democrat county governance. But things changed, about the same time constitutional carry and shall issue came we also voted the democrats out of office. But the effect of the constitutional carry was that more people now had guns suddenly, and they used those guns to shoot the gang members when they committed their crimes – the crime rate dropped greatly and although not at the almost non-existent levels like it was previous the gangs the gun owners had reclaimed their community and the county from crime and the gang members were much more reluctant to pull their stuff in our area or in the test of the county and moved to the town next door to us where their police department handled it by sometimes having to shoot them but mostly by getting them prosecuted and convicted and being prosecuted AND convicted for their for their crimes, or being shot for it, was something new to them as back across the state line in that other city they were rarely arrested and the citizens didn’t shoot them very much because they had been mostly disarmed by anti-gun policies.
But, the effect of the democrat ‘racial balancing’ and gang crime was that property values went down, the number of black people increased but the average income for black people dropped to around $40,000.00 because the black people being attracted in were lower wage earners, and the number of family’s on public assistance increased to where almost 25% of the black population families are on public assistance of some type. I and others ended up with several DGU’s. Had to sell our house and land at a loss, as did hundreds of others, just to get out of the area before we ended up dead at the hands of gang members, property values would never come back. The county said they were going to take it by ‘imminent domain’ to force the rest of the people out so they sold too like the rest of us did when a company came in and bought it all and bull dozed it all down and then turned around and sold the land to the county which that democrat county governance was going to use for more ‘racially balancing’ low income housing – but never got the chance because they got voted out of office and republicans voted in by mostly black people but it was too late even though its a republican county governance. But that area today is a very nice county park and not ‘low income housing’.
Of course we no longer live there, have not in years, we built a new home elsewhere.
correction for: “…the number of black people increased but the average income for black people dropped to around $40,000.00 because the black people being attracted in were lower wage earners,…”
should have been…
…the number of black people increased but the county average income figure for black people dropped to around $40,000.00 because the black people being attracted in were lower wage earners,..