The Council on Criminal Justice just released its mid-year 2026 crime update, and the numbers are historic: the national homicide rate is on track to hit its lowest point since at least 1900. Not the lowest in decades. The lowest in over 125 years. Following the 30% murder surge of 2020, American cities have now achieved a crime decline that erases not just the pandemic spike but the multi-decade trend that preceded it.
The left’s response to this news is what you’d expect: a determined search for explanations that don’t credit anything President Donald Trump and his administration have been doing.
“Researchers and practitioners have pointed to a range of possible influences, including changes in criminal justice operations and strategies, technological advances, and broad shifts in society and culture,” the CCJ report hedges.
“Community prevention.” “Behavioral trends.” “Prisoner reentry programs.” Right. The gang bangers are improving their behavior. That’s the scientific explanation and if you’re a moron, you’ll believe that.
Let’s try the less politically convenient one. Between 2020 and 2025, approximately 100 million additional guns entered private hands in America. Roughly 30 million Americans acquired guns between 2021 and 2024 alone, including over 11 million first-time owners. The academic literature on defensive gun use is extensive and consistently shows that armed citizens deter crime. More armed citizens means more deterrence. It’s not complicated — it just violates the left’s preferred narrative about gun ownership.
The immigration enforcement effect is equally significant and equally suppressed in the academic literature. ICE’s removal of dangerous criminal aliens — including the 16,000 arrests in Washington D.C. alone over the past year, including 35 homicide suspects and 100 known gang members — directly reduces the pool of people committing violent crimes in American cities. The left prefers the phrase “swept in many people who pose little or no public safety risk” to avoid acknowledging that the people who do pose risks are the ones who mattered.
Washington D.C. is the proof of concept. The city recorded 424 homicides across 2020-2021, peaking at 274 in 2023. In the first half of 2026, it recorded 46 — a 43.9% decline from the same period last year. The National Guard deployment cratered the rate further.
This is what happens when the federal government actually enforces the law, puts violent criminals in prison, removes criminal aliens, and empowers police to do their jobs rather than handcuffing them with “defund” politics and no-bail policies that cycle offenders back onto the streets within hours.
The left will credit “community prevention programs” forever rather than admit that what they advocated — defunding the police, emptying prisons, opening the border — produced 2020’s murder surge. And what Trump implemented produced the decline.
The data is unambiguous. The homicide rate is at a 125-year low. Someone is responsible for that. If Trump would have been blamed for an increase, he deserves credit for the decline.
