Well, slap me with a subpoena and call me surprised. FBI Director Kash Patel – the guy who looks like he could bench-press a subpoena server while reading the Constitution aloud – stepped up to the podium this week and announced that America’s homicide rate is about to hit the lowest level in modern history. Not “pretty low.” Not “getting better.” The lowest. As in, lower than when Ozzie and Harriet were still pretending to sleep in separate beds. Lower than when gas was thirty cents a gallon and the only thing people were killing was time at the drive-in.
We’re talking a hair’s breadth from the days when the biggest threat to your life was your doctor’s cigarette habit.
The Numbers, For Those Who Still Believe in Math
Let’s run the tape, because these figures are so delicious they’re practically caloric.
Back in the summer of 2020 – you remember, that glorious year when we all spent stress-eating sourdough and watching cities burn on television – the murder rate spiked to around 6.8 per 100,000, the highest since the crack-vial ’90s. Cities looked like Grand Theft Auto with worse graphics and real consequences.
Fast-forward through the fever dream of progressive prosecutors, empty jails, and mayors who thought “defund the police” meant free donuts for everybody.
2023: murders drop 10 percent. Nice, but still higher than a Hunter Biden art auction.
2024: another 15 percent plunge, landing us around 5.0 per 100,000 with just under 17,000 bodies. Respectable. Almost civilized.
2025: hold onto your MAGA hat – preliminary numbers through late November show another double-digit bloodbath against the bad guys. Director Patel says the full-year report coming in December will clock in with a 25 percent drop from 2024. That puts us somewhere south of 4 murders per 100,000, maybe kissing 3.7 or 3.8 if the last month stays quiet.
We’re talking fewer than 13,000 murders nationwide. In a country of 340 million people who own 400 million guns and can’t agree on pizza toppings.
That’s not seen this side of the Eisenhower administration, when the biggest gang problem was a bunch of greasers arguing over who got to wear the leather jacket.
How Did We Pull Off This Minor Miracle?
Funny thing – turns out when you stop treating criminals like endangered species and start treating them like, well, criminals – they tend to knock it off.
The Trump administration came in swinging like Mike Tyson with a law degree. Record arrests. Record drug seizures. Record deportations of the entrepreneurial gentlemen who used to turn certain neighborhoods into free-fire zones. Operation Summer Heat – which sounds like a bad cologne but is actually the FBI’s very hot policing initiative – flooded high-crime pockets with feds, task forces, and enough overtime to make a union boss weep with joy.
Suddenly the guys who thought “catch and release” was just for fish discovered it doesn’t apply when you’ve got three strikes and a teardrop tattoo.
Cities that spent four years pretending bail reform was working discovered that, shockingly, letting the same guy out fifteen times doesn’t make him suddenly discover mindfulness. Who knew?
The border got serious again, which meant the MS-13 recruitment drive dried up faster than a California reservoir. Fentanyl pouring across like it was on a schedule got interrupted. Gang leaders started getting very long federal vacations instead of revolving-door weekends.
And the cops – remember them? – got their backs instead of their budgets cut. Morale went up. Arrests went up. Bodies went down.
Simple equation, really. Works every time it’s tried.
The Experts Are Furious, Naturally
The sociology professors are currently curled up in the fetal position, clutching their “root causes” TED Talks and sobbing into their fair-trade coffee. The same people who told us locking up criminals was racist now have to explain why fewer criminals walking the streets means fewer murders.
It’s almost like there’s a correlation or something. Weird.
Meanwhile, in the real world where people have jobs and mortgages and kids who walk to school, nobody’s complaining. Your average American is too busy not getting carjacked to worry about the feelings of three-time armed robbers.
The Bottom Line
America just proved something we’ve always known but forgot during our four-year national nervous breakdown: when you enforce the damn laws, protect the border, back the cops, and stop pretending every thug is just a misunderstood poet, people stop shooting each other quite so enthusiastically.
Who could’ve guessed that putting Americans first would, you know, help Americans not die.
Director Patel basically told the criminal class: play stupid games, win stupid prizes – preferably in a country that isn’t this one.
And miracle of miracles, they listened.
So here’s to the lowest murder rate since guys wore hats unironically. May it keep dropping until the only thing getting murdered is the narrative that America is some hellscape requiring European-style nanny-stating.
We’re back, baby. And safer than we’ve been in living memory.
Pass the bourbon. This one’s worth celebrating.