In the debate about violent crime, we're routinely told that the answer to our problems lies in gun control. Failure to enact it means lectures from “very serious people” about how you just want people dead. This is a truism of the left that cannot be questioned.
And Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just illustrated that it's also complete nonsense.
Don't get me wrong, officials in Philly prefer gun control. They want to pass scads of such laws and are only prevented from doing so thanks to the state’s preemption law that expressly blocks them from really doing so.
Yet, the city has seen a massive drop in homicides:
Philadelphia experienced a surge in shootings and homicides during the COVID-19 years that disproportionately affected young Black and Latino men in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with drug markets.
In 2020, Philadelphia had 499 homicides – nearly 150 more than the previous year. Gun violence worsened in 2021 – with 562 homicides that year – and then dropped slightly in 2022.
Fortunately, recent data shows a notable decline in these crimes over the past two years. As of late September 2024, homicides are down 40% for the year to date compared with 2023. And the number of shooting victims has decreased similarly – from 1,236 in the first eight months of 2023 to 758 for the same period in 2024.
As professors of criminal justice who live in Greater Philadelphia, we know that there is no single explanation for the drop in gun violence. Rather, many factors at both the local and national levels could be playing a role.
None of the proposed explanations, however, include gun control.
See, while Philadelphia can't pass gun control, the state could, but hasn't. There are no new gun control regulations on the books that impact the city of Philadelphia, and yet, homicides are down 40 percent compared to this point last year. That's a massive drop by anyone's estimation.
What's more, this was written by academics. Based on what we've long seen, academics aren't exactly inclined to not credit gun control at every opportunity. They simply can't because there isn't any to account for what just happened.
Instead, the authors cite factors such as cracking down on crime by shutting down open-air drug markets — who would have thought? — and other tough-on-crime strategies the left generally argues are racist.
Admittedly, they also cite national crime trends. Violent crime is going down across the nation, and Philadelphia's drop in homicides fits into that.
Again, there aren't any significant new gun control regulations that could possibly account for the nationwide drop in homicides. While President Joe Biden has certainly tried to make life difficult for lawful gun owners, nothing he's done impacts criminals, so gun control can't be responsible.
In other words, the entire myth that gun control is necessary to combat crime has been shattered.
Guns aren't the issue.
In fact, our non-gun homicide rate is higher than the total homicide rate for other developed nations. That includes gun-related homicides in those other countries, mind you. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
If the issue was guns, though, that wouldn't be the case.
Moreover, we also see that the homicide rate can plummet seemingly overnight without gun control as well.
Everywhere you look, there's more and more evidence that gun control isn't the answer. The problem is that those who are tasked with actually looking at that aren't interested in seeing it.