Violent Crime May Be at Historic Lows, but Guess Where Anti-Gun Orgs Still Point the Finger of Blame

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Everytown-backed March for Our Lives would be touting Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, An American Way of Killing. Here’s the blurb from the book . . .

The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?

In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity”―how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest countries.

Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy?

In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it. 

This is pretty odd timing for a book like this, given that the recent massive expansion in carry rights in America was followed by homicide rates hitting record lows.

The truth is, America doesn’t have a broad-based homicide or gun-related homicide problem. What it has is two things that need to be solved:

1. Increasingly rare, but shocking mass shootings. These are a modern phenomenon of the last couple decades. Before that, they occasionally happened, but were even more rare. While not a statistical threat given their rarity, they should still be dealt with — in a way that does not violate the Second Amendment, obviously — because of the effect they have on the national psyche in addition to the families they devastate.

2. Black-on-black homicides which explains over half of our homicide problem. If this issue were finally somehow resolved and the black community had a homicide rate equivalent to its share of the population, the US homicide rate would essentially match Canada’s. Read my earlier article on the racial disparities in homicides here.

Here is the (still provisional) data for 2026 from the CDC on gun-related homicides. Thanks to the decline in homicides nationally, numbers are down across the board, but the disparities are still obvious.

Non-hispanic white Americans — who also are our most gun-owning demographic — have a gun-related homicide rate of 1.5 per 100,000. But for black Americans, it is 16.3 per 100,000.

That’s the whole ballgame, folks. Want to do something to further reduce violent crime in America beyond its current historically low rate? Fix our busted inner cities and their broken culture.

Instead, though, the other side targets guns because focusing on the real issue exposes Democrat governments’ failures. They’ve run those inner cities for decades, and they pushed the welfare and other policies that have wrecked black families (not to mention zero bail and defunded police departments). It’s like if you had a big drunk driving problem and your solution was to find creative ways to restrict car ownership.

 

Kostas Moros is Director of Legal Research and Education for the Second Amendment Foundation.