An Era of Peace and Safety

One would not get the impression from the news that we were living through a historic era of peace, nonviolence, and safety. Apparently we are!

The FBI estimates that murder fell 18 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. There was an estimated 9 percent drop in overall violent crime and a 12 percent drop in overall property crime.

Overall, it was the largest percentage point drop in murder, violent crime and property crime ever recorded. With murder you have to go all the way back to 2024 to find the previous largest one-year drop in murder and before that the previous largest one-year drop was in 2023....

I wrote about this as well a few months ago here and noted the unreliability of those mid-1950s estimates and that the more modern estimates really begin in 1958. I think it’s fair to say that the US murder rate in 2025 was roughly the lowest ever recorded and there probably won’t be any ambiguity when the 2026 data is released next year.

Emphasis added. His project includes an attempt to estimate what the FBI statistics will look like going forward, which his method has shown success at with this year's data. So next year, he estimates this based on what we've seen so far of 2026:

The 2026 US Murder Rate Will Be By Far The Lowest Ever Recorded

...The 2025 murder rate should come in at between 4.1 and 4.4 per 100k while the 2026 murder rate should come in at an astonishing 3 to 3.8 per 100k based on the currently available data. Could that change? Yes. Is it a sensible forecast given all we currently know? Also yes. Will the 2026 rate be substantially lower than anything we've ever recorded (FBI murder estimates back to 1960)? Almost certainly yes.

Emphasis not added. That's the headline.

All of this at least correlates with a vast expansion of the number of firearms owned by private citizens, now well more than one per person, almost all of them unregistered (more than 393 million unregistered firearms, that is). The historically low murder rate correlates as well as with SCOTUS' expansion of gun rights -- including the insistence in Bruen that states, even New York, allow for some form of concealed carry rights by citizens. 

As I have pointed out in the past, America was already a very safe nation. The illusion presented by the news is a version of the availability heuristic: we have a lot of news when things go wrong, so a lot of information. The fact that things go right almost always almost everywhere generates no information for our brains, and indeed happens at such a scale that it is beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of millions of people live together in peace and safety every day. We can't calculate that, or comprehend it as a whole against which to measure the rare exception.

A fact about the United States that is apparently difficult to grasp is that almost all homicide happens in a very small number of neighborhoods. Most American counties have a murder rate of zero -- not zero percent, zero murders. The vast majority of the remnant have very few murders. The murder rate of the United States as a whole is driven as high as it is not even by a few bad cities. It is driven there by a few neighborhoods within a few cities. For the most part, America has no violence problem, no 'gun violence' problem, no crime problem.

An armed society is a polite society. Ours is getting downright peaceful. Too bad no one knows it.