Brady president Kris Brown’s recent X post insisting that shootings are on the rise runs headlong into FBI and CDC data showing violent crime at multi-decade lows, with gun homicides down roughly 11 percent in 2023 and overall firearm deaths falling for the second straight year. Rather than grapple with those numbers, Brown recycles the familiar “more guns, more crime” talking point that has been repeatedly falsified by the post-2020 surge in gun ownership coinciding with the steepest two-year drop in homicide since the 1990s. The rhetorical move is transparent: if the raw data refuses to cooperate, shift the goalposts to “shootings” writ large—then conflate defensive uses, accidents, and the tiny subset of criminal events into one scary aggregate that can be blamed on law-abiding carriers.

For the 2A community the episode is a reminder that institutional gun-control groups are now operating in a post-truth information environment where narrative maintenance trumps empirical correction. When the president of the nation’s oldest gun-control organization cannot acknowledge that expanded carry laws in 29 states have not produced the predicted bloodbath, it signals desperation rather than strength. Lawmakers and voters should treat such claims as political press releases, not data, and continue advancing permitless carry, constitutional carry reciprocity, and the protection of private transfers that have demonstrably coincided with falling violent crime.