By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) is reporting that the number of homicides during the first seven months of this year are down more than 18 percent from the same period in 2025, and if the trend continues, “it would imply a murder rate for the year of 3.35 per 100,000 people (after adjusting for population growth).”
Yet, according to FBI data on background check requests from the National Instant Check System (NICS), it appears people are still buying lots of firearms, though the numbers are down from the record years of 2020 and 2021. Still, it is more evidence that predictions from gun prohibition lobbying groups that more guns in private ownership would result in higher violent crime rates have been all wrong.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation publishes monthly “NSSF Admjusted” figures drawn from NICS data, which provide closer estimates to the number of actual backgrokund checks relating to actual gun transactions. So far this year, that number is more than 10.6 million, and there are still three months’ worth of data (October, November, December) to add, so the actual number of gun transactions could approach or possibly even pass the total for 2025 which was 14,612,314. This might be affected by the outcome of next week’s midterm elections. If Democrats take back control of Congress, history suggests more people will be buying guns in anticipation of more gun control over the next two years.
“If we do not adjust for the fact that fewer jurisdictions are reporting data to the FBI in 2026 than in 2025,” CPRC says in its report, which was released last week, “the apparent crime declines become even larger. Using the unadjusted figures, homicides fell 26.4% during the first seven months of 2026, 24.4% during the first six months, and 23.1% during the first five months.
“But the decline in reporting coverage is substantial,” the report adds. “For example, agencies reporting data for July 2025 covered 96.51% of the population, compared with only 81.62% in July 2026. Significant coverage gaps exist in each of the first nine months of 2026 compared with the same months in 2025.”
CPRC tosses in this caveat: “For that reason, our estimates of the decline in crime adjust for differences in population coverage. They remain estimates, however, because we do not yet know precisely which jurisdictions reported data in each month of 2025 and 2026.”
TGM first looked at this trend back in late July, when The Trace was reporting “Gun violence is down, significantly, as gun sales are ticking up for the first time in years.”
The Trace report went on to acknowledge, “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…The per-capita figure of 1.9 shooting deaths per 100,000 Americans is also the lowest in that span.”
Dr. John Lott, CPRC founder and president, recently appeared at the Gun Rights Policy Conference to tell grassroots activists from around the country, “By far the safest course of action to take when you’re confronted by a criminal, and this is true for everybody, but it’s particularly true for women, is to have a gun.”
Lott is the recipient of this year’s Gun Rights Defender of the Year award from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He noted how a considerable number of the nation’s homicides occur in very small areas in the U.S.
“Guns are used defensively to stop crimes about five times more frequently than they are used in the commission of crimes,” Lott said. “We have data from the National Crime Victimization Survey which indicates how many gun crimes we have occur each year. It’s about 300,000. And I would argue we have at least 1.5 million defensive gun uses that are occurring each year.”
