California Sees Drop in Homicides. There's A Reason for That and Leftists Won't Like It

California has more gun control laws than any other state, though Virginia is clearly trying to catch up. Proponents of these laws keep on saying that it makes the state safer, even though violent crime ebbs and flows at roughly the same rate there as everywhere else, even without new regulations.

Now, Attorney General Rob Bonta is celebrating what looks like a massive win, but misses something.

See, the homicide rate went down across the nation, but California's went way down.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Tuesday highlighted what he called historic progress in the state's fight against gun violence.
"California has achieved something historic with the lowest rates of firearm deaths, suicides and homicides on record," he said during a press conference.
According to Bonta, in 2024, California saw the lowest numbers of firearm-related deaths since 1968. That also drove the state's overall homicide rate to its lowest level on record in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Bonta's office said.

Now, anti-gunners will likely glomp onto this as proof that gun control works, that California's gun laws discourage gun ownership to the same degree as we see in other states, which means fewer guns, which translates to lower crime.

Right?

Now, that's a huge increase in gun ownership, particularly in a state with California's population. Yes, the gun laws try to discourage this, but with the homicide spike we all saw in 2020 and 2021, coupled with pandemic-related concerns, a lot of people got into the gun game around that time. They bought firearms, then the Supreme Court's decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen ended the state's "may issue" permitting law that required law-abiding people to justify why they needed a permit.

Those reasons were rarely good enough for the authorities, so few people carried guns lawfully.

With that, coupled with the increase in gun ownership that we know about--we won't get into the otherwise law-abiding people who ignored the laws on things like 3D printed guns or registration efforts--and we see that gun ownership skyrocketed, and rather than see a corresponding increase in violence, we're hitting a record low.

Somehow, I don't think Bonta will ever acknowledge this fact.

In fairness, correlation isn't causation, so an increase in gun ownership with a corresponding drop in homicides isn't a slam dunk. I'll acknowledge that all day, every day.

But I will say that causation should create a correlation, and anti-gunners have been saying for decades that more guns mean more crime. This is clear evidence that the claim simply isn't true. It undermines the very foundation of gun control, even if you ignore the Second Amendment arguments against it.

Unfortunately, the media won't talk about that. They'll attribute California's success here to some law that restricts guns or ammo or something else, but never point out how gun ownership has blown up at the same time this drop happened.

Why tell the truth? They're the mainstream media, after all. They don't know how.