They predicted bloodshed. They got historic safety instead.
I was the first person in my New Jersey county to receive a concealed carry permit after Bruen. The municipal police weren’t just cooperative—they were enthusiastic. “We need more good guys with guns,” they told me. They understood what the experts apparently didn’t: law-abiding citizens carrying firearms aren’t the problem. They never were.
Three years later, the data proves them right and the experts catastrophically wrong.
The Certainty of the Predictions
When the Supreme Court struck down New York’s “proper cause” requirement in June 2022, the warnings weren’t tentative suggestions. They were declarations of inevitable catastrophe.
Social science research, they insisted, clearly showed that “proper cause” regimes led to lower homicide and violent crime rates. The Supreme Court’s decision would have a “detrimental effect on the safety and well-being of New Yorkers and Americans.” Research demonstrated that making it easier to carry guns in public would “result in more gun deaths.” States would “confront an increase in violent crimes and homicides.” There would be “a spike in violent crime,” more stolen guns, fewer solved cases. The expansion of concealed carry was “associated with increased firearm violence.”
The Court, they said, had “disregarded the evidence.”
I knew they were wrong then. The data now proves it beyond dispute.
What Happened: The Largest Expansion of Gun Rights in Modern History
Bruen didn’t just crack open the door—it blew it off the hinges. And Americans responded.
Nationwide, concealed carry permit holders nearly doubled from roughly 11 million in 2014 to nearly 22 million in 2023. But the real explosion came in states like mine, where citizens had been denied their constitutional rights for decades.
New Jersey saw concealed carry permits increase nearly 20-fold in under two years. About 35,000 permit-to-carry applications came in after Bruen, compared to just 1,600 before. I was among the first wave, standing in line at my county office while the clerks learned the new process in real time.
Maryland experienced a 900% increase in new applications. California went from approximately 100,000 concealed carry permits statewide to over 500,000 by 2025. New York City saw applications surge 50% in just the two months following the decision. San Francisco went from 2 applications per year to 45 in the weeks after Bruen.
Six states adopted constitutional carry after the ruling: Indiana, Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, Louisiana, and South Carolina, bringing the total to 29 states. I’ve since moved to North Carolina, which just became constitutional carry. The difference is night and day—no permission slip required to exercise a constitutional right.
The numbers tell the story of liberation. America now has an estimated 500 million civilian-owned firearms—roughly 1.5 per adult. Individual gun ownership rose from 25% of Americans in 1994 to 32% in 2024. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 26 million Americans became first-time gun owners. Gun sales hit 22.68 million in 2020 and remained elevated through 2022, far exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
This was the scenario the experts warned about. More guns than people. Concealed carry permits increasing 900%. Constitutional carry spreading across the country. They predicted chaos.
What Actually Happened: Historic Safety
The year 2025 is shaping up to have the lowest homicide rate since 1900. Let that sink in. The lowest in 125 years.
Across 35 large cities, homicides fell 21% from 2024—922 fewer murders. Denver, Omaha, and Washington, D.C. saw drops exceeding 40%. The nationwide homicide rate is projected at 4.0 per 100,000, the largest single-year drop on record.
Violent crime fell 9% overall in 2025. Aggravated assaults dropped 9%. Gun assaults—the very thing the experts swore would increase—plummeted 22%. Robberies fell 23%.
This follows a 15% homicide decrease in 2024 and a 13% drop in 2023. Many cities are experiencing 50-60 year lows in murders. The violent crime rate in 2024 hit its lowest point since 1969.
The FBI confirms it nationally. Violent crime fell 4.5% from 2023 to 2024. Murder dropped 14.9%. The murder rate fell from 5.9 per 100,000 to 5.0. Aggravated assaults involving firearms decreased 8.6%.
Since June 2022—the month Bruen was decided—the 12-month running average of violent crime fell 14% through October 2025. Murders fell 39% over the same period. Gun assaults declined 15%.
Maryland, where permit applications surged 900%? Crime dropped. New Jersey, where permits increased 20-fold? Crime dropped. California, where issuances quintupled? Crime dropped.
The predicted bloodbath never came. Instead, we got the safest America in over a century.
Why the Experts Were Wrong
The experts made a fundamental error: they treated legal gun owners like criminals. They assumed that more concealed carry permits meant more shootings, as if law-abiding citizens who submit to background checks, pay fees, and comply with training requirements are indistinguishable from gang members and armed robbers.
My local police understood the distinction immediately. They knew that citizens willing to go through the permit process, who carry legally and responsibly, make communities safer, not more dangerous. They knew the difference between good guys and bad guys with guns.
The data backs this up. States with high legal gun ownership rates don’t necessarily have high gun involvement in crime. The problem isn’t legal ownership—it’s illegal access combined with concentrated poverty and weak enforcement of existing laws.
Legal gun owners aren’t the ones driving up crime statistics. We never were. The experts confused correlation with causation, ignored the behavior of actual permit holders, and predicted disaster based on models that bore no relationship to reality.
What This Means
This isn’t just about being right. It’s about vindication of a constitutional principle that the elites spent decades trying to explain away.
The Second Amendment isn’t a loophole or a historical accident. It’s a fundamental right, and when that right is respected and expanded, society doesn’t collapse. It thrives.
The police officer who told me we need “more good guys with guns” understood something the Harvard professors and think tank experts didn’t: an armed citizenry, properly understood, is a bulwark of civil society, not a threat to it.
Bruen was a massive victory—not just for gun rights advocates, but for the millions of Americans who can now defend themselves and their families. The dramatic expansion of concealed carry didn’t produce chaos. It coincided with the most dramatic crime decline in American history.
I don’t need to hedge that statement. I don’t need to say “correlation isn’t causation” or “the relationship is complex.” The experts made specific, confident predictions about what would happen if concealed carry expanded. Every single one of those predictions was wrong.
They said more guns would mean more violence. We got more guns and less violence. They said concealed carry permits would lead to bloodshed. We got historic safety instead.
The data doesn’t require interpretation. It requires acknowledgement.
Moving Forward
I now live in a constitutional carry state, where I don’t need government permission to exercise my Second Amendment rights. That’s how it should be everywhere. Bruen moved us closer to that reality, and the results speak for themselves.
The next time experts line up to predict catastrophe from expanded gun rights, remember the Bruen predictions. Remember that every dire warning proved false. Remember that the largest expansion of concealed carry in modern history produced the safest America in over a century.
The experts were wrong. The Second Amendment was right. And the data proves it beyond any reasonable doubt.
