FEWER MURDERERS, FEWER MURDERS?

Our President recently claimed credit for a century-plus low in the annual murder rate.  Reason's Alexandra Stinson suggests otherwise.

While it's still too early to officially say, all signs indicate that 2025 will have the largest drop in murder rates in recorded history. The Trump administration will likely take credit for this feat, but this probably would have happened regardless of who was in the White House.

It's the nature of presidents to claim credit for stuff that happens during their term, whether they had anything to do with it or not, and to lay the blame on somebody who came before.  The fall in murder rates has been present for a few years.

The decline is noteworthy, but it is not especially surprising, given recent trends. "We're seeing the largest one-year drop in murder for the third straight year in 2025," crime data analyst Jeff Asher told Reason's Billy Binion earlier this week. "We're seeing the murder rate at the lowest level that we've ever recorded it."

While we won't know the exact drop in the 2025 murder rate until official data come out in August or September of this year, Asher expects the decline to be "somewhere in the 18 to 20 percent range." This would "supplant 2024, which supplanted 2023 as the largest one-year drop ever recorded."

The exact reason for this decline is unknown. Some have theorized that trauma care at emergency rooms has improved, which has led to fewer casualties from shootings. That's "a factor," says Asher, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

So far, nobody has revisited John Donohue and Steven Levitt's "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," which was a featured story in Freakonomics, subsequently drawing substantial counter-arguments.  The authors published a follow-on paper in 2020 suggesting the correlation my post's title hints at.  "Legalized abortion is estimated to have reduced violent crime by 47% and property crime by 33% over [1991 to 2014], and thus can explain most of the observed crime decline."