The American gun violence narrative is built on a lie of omission. Here are the numbers they never show you.
In 2023, the CDC recorded 46,728 gun deaths in the United States. That is the number gun opponents lead with. It lands on the screen, it stays there, and the conversation is effectively over before it begins. You are meant to feel the weight of it and stop asking questions.
Do not stop asking questions.
Gun suicides accounted for 58 percent of all gun deaths in 2023, totaling 27,300 deaths. Strip those out and you are already below 20,000. Now the gun control movement has a real problem, because suicide is a mental health crisis, not a firearms crisis. Many who attempt suicide by gun would turn to another method in the absence of one, though firearms are uniquely lethal. The gun is not the disease. The despair is.
Now look at what remains. Gun homicides fell for the second year in a row, dropping from 20,958 in 2021 down to 17,927 in 2023. And by 2024, the CDC’s finalized data showed 15,364 gun homicides total. The number is in freefall.
46,728 sounds like an epidemic. 15,364 sounds like a crisis. The actual number of Americans killed by strangers with guns sounds like something else entirely.
Of those homicides, how many are strangers killing strangers? According to FBI data, only 9.7 percent of homicide victims were murdered by strangers. By contrast, 12.3 percent were killed by family members and 28 percent by someone known to them. The offender relationship was unknown in the remaining cases, and unknown does not mean stranger.
More than half of all female homicides are committed by a current or former male intimate partner, and the vast majority of murder-suicides involve intimate partners. This is a domestic violence crisis wearing a gun violence costume.
According to the Department of Justice, between 15 and 33 percent of gun homicides in urban areas are linked to gang and drug activity. Researchers in Boston and Philadelphia found that between 73 and 93 percent of gun homicide victims had prior criminal records, meaning the overwhelming majority of gun violence in America is not happening between strangers. It is happening within criminal networks, between people who know each other, and inside households torn apart by violence long before a gun was ever involved.
Strip out the suicides. Strip out the gang and drug trade killings. Strip out the intimate partner violence. What you have left is the scenario your neighbor imagines when they say they are afraid of guns: the random stranger, the cowboy, the trigger-happy American who might shoot a tourist on the street.
The true random-stranger scenario is a tiny fraction of gun deaths, far smaller than the headline number implies. If you are visiting America for the World Cup this summer, you are not in danger unless you buy and sell drugs or otherwise connect yourself to the parts of our society where violence lives. Stay out of that ecosystem and you are statistically safer than the headline numbers suggest in almost any American city.
More than 494 million firearms have been manufactured for civilian use in America since 1899. Total civilian firearms in circulation are now estimated somewhere between 500 and 540 million. More than 21 million Americans bought their first gun between 2020 and 2023 alone. In 2020, 8.4 million Americans became first-time gun owners in a single year.
Now here is the number that ends the argument. The rate of nonfatal firearm violence declined 72 percent from 1993 to 2023, dropping from 7.3 to 2.0 victimizations per 1,000 persons. Compared to 1993, the peak of American gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49 percent lower by 2010, even as the population grew by tens of millions.
The country went from 200 million civilian firearms in 1993 to more than 500 million today. The gun homicide rate is less than half of what it was at its peak. The thesis writes itself.
If more guns caused more violence, the trendline would run the other direction. It does not. Whatever is driving violence in America, it is not the guns sitting in law-abiding closets across this country.
Economist John Lott spent years assembling the most comprehensive dataset ever built on American gun crime, analyzing 15 years of data across more than 3,000 counties. His core finding was direct: when states shifted from may-issue concealed carry laws to shall-issue laws, counties saw roughly an 8 percent drop in murders, a 5 percent reduction in rapes, and a 7 percent decrease in aggravated assaults.
The gun control establishment challenged him furiously. His critics never made him disappear. The debate continued, but Lott’s core finding remains one of the central empirical challenges to the gun-control narrative.
Organizations like RAND describe the evidence on concealed carry as mixed, but mixed is not refuted, and the burden of proof runs against those who want to disarm the law-abiding.
Lott then produced the data point that may be the single most devastating number in the entire gun debate.
Concealed handgun permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at one-sixth the rate at which police officers are convicted. Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is 2.4 per 100,000.
Read that again. This community of millions of armed Americans is more law-abiding than the people society has credentialed and uniformed to carry guns professionally.
As of 2024, there were at least 21.46 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States, representing 8.2 percent of the adult population. And that number dramatically understates reality. Twenty-nine states now have Constitutional Carry laws, meaning people there may carry concealed handguns without permits at all, covering 67.7 percent of the land mass of this country and nearly half its population. Tennessee is one of those states.
A survey conducted by McLaughlin and Associates found that 15.6 percent of general election voters carry concealed handguns on any given day. Tens of millions of people. Armed. Walking among you at the grocery store, the school pickup line, the church parking lot. Not shooting anyone.
I became a concealed carry permit holder years ago, before Tennessee adopted Constitutional Carry. I know who carries. They are the most serious, most disciplined, most law-abiding people I know. They think about their weapon constantly, not because it calls to them, but because they have accepted the weight of the responsibility. The sheepdog does not want to use his teeth. He wants the wolves to go somewhere else.
Tens of millions of armed Americans walk among us every day. The ones afraid of guns have invented a moral agency the gun does not possess.
Years ago, after an incident in the community where my ministry is based, some of my staff asked about our protocols. What would we do if someone armed came and tried to commit crimes against the children in our care?
I told them what any responsible administrator would say. Lock doors. Use access control when possible. Call 911 and stay on the phone. And I told them that I would run toward the threat to try to end it.
With what, they asked.
With my gun, I said.
You are storing a gun here? They asked in something close to horror.
I told them I was not storing a gun. I was carrying a gun.
What followed was one of the stranger conversations of my professional life. How long have you been carrying? they asked. I told them the truth: for years, every day, as we worked side by side. The staff members who had a fear of firearms I had not known about went quiet for a moment. Then something shifted. They realized they had trusted me for years without knowing. They had not felt uncomfortable or scared. They had not sensed something dangerous in the room. And they began to reckon honestly with whether their fear was of guns or of the people they had imagined carrying them.
Most carriers do not carry openly, and for many good reasons. We are not making a statement. We are not looking for a confrontation. We are praying we never have to use the thing we spend real time making sure we are trained and prepared to use. The weight of that responsibility is not a burden we resent. It is one we chose, because someone has to.
People who fear guns have assigned them a moral agency they do not possess. They imagine the firearm as a kind of One Ring, a corrupting object that bends the soul of whoever holds it toward darkness and violence. Carry long enough, they believe, and it will call to you. It will whisper. It will find its way into your hand in a moment of rage.
The data refuses to cooperate with this fantasy.
When proposals came to allow teachers to carry in schools, opponents predicted exactly this scenario: that the presence of a gun would corrupt the carrier and create bloodshed in classrooms. The problem for them was that other states had already tried it. And there has not been a single school shooting in any school where teachers are legally armed. Not one. In districts where teachers carry, the shooting rate is zero.
Shooters themselves have confirmed the logic. The Nashville Covenant school shooter passed up two separate targets because the security was too great. The Buffalo shooter wrote explicitly that areas with low concealed carry permit rates make better targets. The armed citizen is not the threat. The armed citizen is the deterrent.
The Memphis Variable
Here is a thought experiment. Memphis politicians have occasionally floated the idea of separating from Tennessee. Set aside the legal absurdity of that for a moment and just look at the numbers.
Memphis is consistently ranked among the most dangerous cities in the United States. Knoxville is posting historic crime lows. Both are in Tennessee. Both are subject to the same state gun laws. One has a gang and drug trade ecosystem driving its violence. The other does not.
A study found 17 active gangs in Knoxville responsible for nearly half of the city’s gun violence incidents. The answer was not to remove guns from law-abiding citizens. The answer was to identify and isolate the small number of people actually driving the violence. It has worked.
Without gangs and drug dealers, America is not a deeply violent country. The guns have nothing to do with it. The social ecosystems do.
Gun control advocates often want to compare America to Europe. Fine. Let’s examine a societal choice causing death.
In the summer of 2022 alone, researchers estimated 61,672 heat-related deaths across Europe between May and September. The prior record was set in 2003, when more than 70,000 Europeans died from heat in a single summer. The reason is straightforward: only about 19 percent of European households have air conditioning, compared to nearly 90 percent of American households.
So here is the comparison. In a single summer, Europeans died from heat at a rate of more than 60,000, largely because of a cultural and policy resistance to air conditioning that American progressives would enthusiastically import here. Meanwhile, Americans are called barbaric for owning guns that, in the hands of random strangers, kill fewer people annually than the headline number’s defenders will ever acknowledge.
The people calling you dangerous are the ones choosing to see more death rather than install a window unit.
Let me put the whole picture together plainly.
America has more than 500 million civilian firearms. Tens of millions of AR-style rifles. More than 20 million concealed carry permit holders, plus tens of millions more in Constitutional Carry states who carry without one. The total number of Americans carrying a firearm on any given day is a staggering figure.
And the gun homicide rate is less than half of what it was in 1993. Non-fatal gun violence is down 72 percent over that same period. Knoxville just recorded its first murder-free quarter since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
The narrative you have been sold is not about guns. It was never about guns. It is about control, about who gets to be trusted with force, about whether the government or the citizen holds the presumption of competence and responsibility.
The data has answered that question.
The armed citizen is not the problem.
The armed citizen is the point.
Clayton Wood is a Knoxville lawyer, pastor and contributing writer for TriStar Daily.
