It's not that guns are deadlier or more accurate. It's that there are more guns, period. Maybe a few years ago the dude who just killed his two roommates wouldn't have had a gun and would have assaulted them, but he had a ghost gun, apparently, so it became a homicide.

^

Follow this guy for more terrible advice!

Since we're providing context here...

Prior to 2012/2013, the last time DC had less than 100 murders was 1963. I think it's slightly misleading to set the lowest homicide rate in over half a century as the point of comparison, don't you?

As a further point of context, as of June 24th of this year the murder rate was up 16% over 2021.

So the entirety of the drop in killings has come in the last two months of the year. Hell, when I first started pointing this out on December 13th, the murder rate was "only" down 9%, so it's dropped an additional 2% year-over-year in just the last half of this month.

Nationwide, homicides are down 5% this year. And guess what? Nationwide, they ALSO surged during the pandemic. It's odd to me to see so much of the discussion center around DC-specific policies when we're talking about something that happened across the country.

All of this info strongly indicates to me that, while homicides are still relatively high in comparison to the lowest number of homicides in the past fifty years, the surge that started in 2020 seems to be due to macro effects that seem to be lessening. I plan to check back in halfway through the year in 2023. I would expect to see a pretty dramatic drop in year-over-year homicides.

I think that a lot of it was also related to short-term pandemic effects. A lot of people were out of work. A lot of teenagers were out of school. A lot of stimulus dollars ensured a fairly high circulation of cash.

We've seen the homicide rate drop significantly just in the past six months, and I'm expecting to a see a pretty sizeable year-on-year decrease for the first half of 2023. Check back in six months to see how accurate that is!

We also just made the two-peat by this much. There are 201 homicides for 2022 and tomorrow is the last day of the year.

Yeah, probably.

Context is interesting. We hit 200 on the second-to-last day of the year. Homicides over all are currently down 11% from 2021. As of June, they were still up 16%, so the entirety of the decrease has come in the second half of this year.

Given the very recent trends, I'd expect that to continue with a big drop in the first half of 2023.

"...who witness their practices."

That whole thing reads like it's written by an AI.