After spiking in the early 1990s, the rate of violent crime (rapes, robberies, assaults and murders) in the U.S. has fallen by half, to levels not seen since 1970. The new FBI crime numbers reported on Monday show that there were only 366 violent offenses last year for every 100,000 U.S. residents — less than half the rate in 1991. The property crime rate also fell last year, to levels not seen since 1967.

There are many theories for why this has happened, but the results are there for anyone to see. Compared to just 25 years ago, today's America is a strikingly safe place to live.

Unfortunately, the public has been slow to get the memo. Each time the Gallup organization has asked about crime since 2003, majorities have said that they believe there is more crime than in the previous year, not less. In 2014, 63 percent believed crime was rising, when it was falling.

Call it a "culture of panic," the product of personal anecdotes and media obsession with crime stories because, as they say, if it bleeds it leads. Public pessimism about modern life dies hard, and many activists have found ways to prey on this pessimism by convincing citizens to give up their rights.


Gun murders in America fell by 4 percent last year, to just over 8,100, and they are down by nearly one-fifth in the last 10 years. Yet non-existent increases in gun violence are cited often to gin up support for new limits on the right to bear arms. Panic is used to justify solutions that limit freedom and have never been proven to work.

An extreme case involves claims about murders with rifles that are so bogus as to be fraudulent. There were 248 murders with rifles in 2014 in a population that owned more than 110 million rifles. Yet each time a high-profile shooting occurs, the first reaction by many is call for a ban on rifles that happen to be designed with a cosmetic military appearance.

Gun control advocacy presents the most obvious example of the panic culture, but the problem goes far beyond any one issue. Illegal drugs are dangerous and we oppose their legalization. Yet panic over the drug trade has invited government abuses that harm the innocent. Obama's IRS is increasingly using civil forfeiture to seize and keep cash from innocent small business owners merely because they make the kinds of small bank deposits sometimes associated with the illicit drug trade.

As the late economist Milton Friedman noted, freedom and prosperity are not natural conditions for human society. In most places and in most times of history, humanity has lacked freedom and lived in squalor.

It is important to remember this on occasion, because it adds perspective when do gooders show up and argue that there is too much personal freedom. Recent economic difficulties and major acts of violence notwithstanding, the United States of 2015 is still one of the safest, most prosperous and best places to live in the history of mankind. Part of the reason for this is the very freedom that the doomsayers would have everyone give up in a fit of panic.


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