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The FBI’s 2025 Crime Data Just Demolished the ‘More Guns, More Crime’ Argument. Here’s What the Numbers Actually Show.


September 10, 2026

The FBI released its 2025 crime data in August 2026. Violent crime fell 9.3% — the largest year-over-year decline since FBI national estimates began in 1936. The murder rate hit 4.1 per 100,000, tying the lowest level in the FBI’s 70-year historical series. This happened during years of record gun sales and a rapidly growing concealed carry population. The data does not prove guns reduce crime. It does prove that the prediction guns would cause crime to rise was wrong.

9.3%Violent crime decline2025 vs. 2024 — largest single-year drop since FBI estimates began in 1936

18.1%Murder declineLargest single-year decrease since 1937 — third straight year of record drops

4.1Murders per 100,000Ties 1955/56 for lowest in FBI history. Fewest murders since 1968.

18.5%Robbery declineLowest robbery rate in 20 years. Rape -7.6%. Assault -7.5%. Property -12.4%.

Every year, the gun control debate generates predictions. More guns means more crime. Expanding concealed carry will produce shootouts in the streets. Removing barriers to firearm ownership will cause violence to rise. These predictions have been central to the policy argument for gun restrictions for decades. The FBI’s 2025 crime data — released August 14, 2026, in an unusually early publication FBI Director Kash Patel called historic — puts those predictions in direct contact with the facts.

The facts are not ambiguous. Violent crime in the United States fell at the fastest pace since FBI national estimates began 90 years ago. The murder rate hit a 70-year low. This happened during a period when more Americans owned more guns than at any prior point in history, when concealed carry permits reached 20.88 million before constitutional carry expansion made the true carry population substantially higher, and when the gun rights community was in the middle of the most sustained legal and legislative expansion of Second Amendment access since Heller.

The data does not prove that guns reduce crime. Correlation is not causation, and the crime decline is a complex phenomenon that criminologists attribute to multiple factors — demographic shifts, economic conditions, policing strategies, and others. What the data does prove is the specific negative: the prediction that more guns in private hands would cause more violent crime was wrong. Demonstrably, measurably, historically wrong.

“This release confirms that crime in the U.S. is falling at or near a historic clip. This is the third straight year of a record drop in murder and the data for 2026 points to a continued large drop this year.”— Jeff Asher, AH Datalytics, August 2026

The Numbers in Full: What the FBI Actually Found

The FBI released its 2025 Reported Crimes in the Nation data on August 14, 2026, using data submitted by more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies covering 96% of the U.S. population — the broadest data submission in the report’s history. The headline findings:

Overall violent crimeDown 9.3% from 2024 │ Largest single-year decline since FBI estimates began in 1936 │ 328 per 100,000 — lowest since 1968
Murder & non-negligent manslaughterDown 18.1% │ Rate of 4.1 per 100,000 — ties 1955/1956 for lowest ever recorded │ Fewest estimated murders since 1968
RobberyDown 18.5% │ Rate of 49.4 per 100,000 — lowest in 20 years
Aggravated assaultDown 7.5% from 2024
Rape (reported)Down 7.6% from 2024
Property crimeDown 12.4% from 2024
Law enforcement assaultsUP — 90,178 officers assaulted in 2026, a 10-year high │ One category that bucked the trend
2026 preliminary dataViolent crime down 10.6% Jan–Jun 2026 vs. same period 2025 │ Murder down 23% │ Robbery down 19.6% │ Rape down 18.6% │ Trend accelerating
Projected 2026 murder rateJeff Asher projects ~3.5 per 100,000 — would be by far the lowest in recorded U.S. history if sustained through year-end
Data coverage17,000+ agencies │ 96% of U.S. population │ 15,000+ agencies on NIBRS │ Largest coverage in report history

The Historical Context: Why These Numbers Are Remarkable

The 2020 murder spike is the comparison point that makes 2025’s numbers meaningful. In 2020, the combination of COVID disruption, civil unrest, and a sharp pullback in proactive policing produced the largest single-year increase in the U.S. murder rate since record-keeping began. The rate jumped from 5.0 per 100,000 in 2019 to 6.5 in 2020, a 30% increase in a single year that gun control advocates immediately attributed to pandemic-era gun sales.

The argument was simple and politically effective: millions of Americans bought guns during COVID; the murder rate spiked; therefore the guns caused the spike. This became the foundation of what gun control organizations called an “epidemic of gun violence” that required emergency legislative response.

The FBI’s 2025 data requires a reckoning with that argument. Gun sales have remained elevated since 2020. The carry population has grown. Constitutional carry has expanded to 29 states. And the murder rate has not merely stabilized — it has collapsed, falling from 6.5 in 2020 to 4.1 in 2025, a 37% decline in five years that now puts the rate below where it was before the COVID spike and at a 70-year historical low.

If the theory that more guns in civilian hands causes more murder were correct, the murder rate should have remained elevated or continued rising as gun ownership stayed at record levels. It did the opposite. The 2020 spike and the subsequent collapse both correlate with the COVID disruption cycle — the disruption produced both the gun-buying surge and the murder spike through separate causal pathways, and as the disruption resolved, the murder rate fell regardless of whether the newly purchased guns were still in private hands. They were. The murders weren’t.

What the data does not say: The crime decline does not prove that gun ownership reduces crime. The causal relationship between gun prevalence and crime rates is genuinely complex and contested in the academic literature, and honest analysis does not overstate what the data supports. What the data does establish clearly is that the specific prediction — that more guns in private hands would cause violence to rise — was not borne out. The murder rate is at a 70-year low after years of record gun sales. That is a fact, not an argument.

The Gun-Specific Picture: Record Ownership, Record Low Crime

Gun Sales Context

NICS background checks — the primary proxy for gun sales — have been elevated since 2020. The COVID-era gun buying surge added an estimated 8.4 million new gun owners. Subsequent years maintained elevated sales. The total number of privately owned firearms in the United States is estimated by the Small Arms Survey and other researchers at well over 400 million as of 2026. That population of firearms has been in private hands for the entire period during which the murder rate fell from 6.5 to 4.1 per 100,000.

Concealed Carry Context

The CPRC’s 2025 Annual Report counted 20.88 million active carry permits — and that number substantially undercounts the actual carry population because 29 states now allow permitless carry. A 2022 peer-reviewed AJPH study, using 2019 data, estimated approximately 16 million Americans carried handguns at least monthly. That population has grown since 2019 through constitutional carry expansion, the Bruen decision’s normalization effect, and the post-COVID carry permit surge.

The murder rate during this period of expanding carry fell to the lowest level in 70 years. The two facts coexist without proving causation in either direction. But they demolish the argument that an expanding carry population inevitably produces more violence.

NFA Item Context

The NFA tax elimination effective January 1, 2026 produced a 177% increase in NFA checks. More suppressors, SBRs, and SBSs are in private hands in 2026 than at any prior point in history. The preliminary 2026 data shows violent crime continuing to fall 10.6% in the first half of the year, with murder down 23%. The expansion of legal NFA item ownership and the continued crime decline are occurring simultaneously.

What the Gun Control Community Is Saying — and What the Data Actually Shows

The gun control response to the FBI data has been predictable and worth addressing directly. The primary response has been to credit the decline to specific policy interventions — red flag laws in certain states, local violence intervention programs, changes in policing strategies — rather than to acknowledge that the relationship between gun prevalence and crime is more complex than the simple causation model implies.

These alternative explanations may have merit. They may genuinely account for some portion of the decline in specific jurisdictions. But they face a basic problem: the crime decline is national, not jurisdictional. It happened in red states and blue states, in states with expansive gun laws and in states with restrictive ones, in constitutional carry states and in states requiring permits. A policy intervention in California or New York does not explain the murder rate falling in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana simultaneously.

The more honest conclusion — which some criminologists have reached regardless of their policy positions — is that the 2020 spike was primarily a COVID disruption phenomenon and that the subsequent decline reflects the resolution of that disruption, with demographic, economic, and community-level factors playing significant roles that are still being studied. The guns-cause-crime and guns-prevent-crime theories both overfit a complex reality.

What is not honest is the continued invocation of an “epidemic of gun violence” when the FBI’s own data shows the murder rate at a 70-year low. The epidemic framing was built on the 2020–2022 spike. The spike ended. The framing has not caught up with the data.

What 2026 Is Looking Like — The Preliminary Trajectory

The FBI’s 2025 report included preliminary 2026 data covering January through June. The early read: violent crime down 10.6% compared to the same period in 2025. Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter down 23%. Robbery down 19.6%. Rape down 18.6%. Aggravated assault down 7.2%. Every major violent crime category continues declining.

Jeff Asher, whose Real-Time Crime Index tracking has proven highly predictive of final FBI numbers, projects the 2026 murder rate at approximately 3.5 per 100,000 if preliminary trends hold through year-end. That would be, unambiguously, the lowest murder rate in recorded United States history. Not the lowest since 1955. The lowest ever.

The 2026 data will be released in 2027. If it confirms the preliminary trajectory, the “more guns, more crime” thesis will have been falsified by the most comprehensive crime data in American history during the period of the most significant gun rights expansion in American history.

Bottom Line: The Data Is In. Here’s What It Actually Says.

Gun Talk Media does not overstate what data supports. The FBI’s 2025 crime figures do not prove that guns reduce crime. They do not vindicate any specific policy. They do not settle the academic debate about the causal mechanisms of crime decline.

What they do is something simpler and more direct: they establish that the claim used most frequently to justify gun restrictions — that more guns in private hands cause more violent crime — has not been borne out during the most significant expansion of civilian gun ownership in American history. The murder rate is at a 70-year low. Record gun sales and record low murder coexist in the same FBI dataset.

That is a fact. It deserves to be stated plainly, without exaggeration, and without overreach. The gun control community built a policy agenda on a prediction. The prediction was wrong. The data says so.

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OUTRAGEOUS: Pregnant Women Vanished From WHERE?!


PREGNANT WOMEN BANNED?

Pennsylvania’s health department just proposed swapping “pregnant woman” for “pregnant individual” across core rules, and the fallout tells you where culture and policy now collide.

Story Snapshot

  • The Department of Health filed a 500-page rewrite that uses gender-neutral terms in pregnancy and postpartum sections.
  • Changes appear in rules tied to testing, coverage, and postpartum care language, not just press releases.
  • Critics say the shift erases women and replaces biology with ideology.
  • The move tracks a wider trend in some health institutions, with sharp debate over clarity and inclusion.

What Changed In Plain Terms

Pennsylvania’s Department of Health introduced a regulatory overhaul on August 8, described as about 500 pages long. Reports say the draft replaces “pregnant woman” and “mother of a newborn” with “pregnant individual” and “postpartum individual” across relevant sections.

The updates land in practical places, like testing rules during pregnancy and instructions tied to postpartum care language. The proposal reflects the administration’s push to use gender-neutral terms in health code text, not only in public messaging.

The update comes amid other maternal and postpartum policy work in the state. Law and policy documents still use sexed terms in many places.

One rule on postpartum eligibility for medical assistance says a woman keeps coverage through the postpartum period, while recent federal approvals pushed that period to 12 months in programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The proposal does not repeal those laws. It rewrites health department regulations, which sit under state statutes.

Why The Language Fight Matters

Words set who is counted, who gets targeted help, and how staff read duties. Advocates argue gender-neutral terms include every patient who can be pregnant, like transgender men and non-binary people. They say it can reduce missed care for small but real groups.

Critics warn that removing “woman” or “mother” can blur sex-specific risks, make data tracking harder, and push ideology into clinical rules. They frame it as a values fight over biological reality and public clarity.

Medical and public health groups do not agree on a single script. Some guidance lists paired terms such as “women and birthing parents” to balance clarity and inclusion.

Others suggest “pregnant patient” or “pregnant person” in general text, while keeping exact sex words where biology drives risk or law demands precision. These split models aim to protect both readability and the dignity of all patients, but their execution varies by agency and audience.

The Case From The Shapiro Administration’s Opponents

Named critics say the department crossed a line. Pennsylvania Family Council’s counsel said the new wording “represents the triumph of ideology over biology” and “erases female identity as a stable category.”

A state lawmaker argued the draft “erases words like ‘pregnant woman’ and ‘mother’” inside hundreds of pages of mandates. That charge lands with many readers because pregnancy is unavoidably sex-linked, and clarity about women’s health is both moral and practical.

The substance behind that critique deserves weight. Public-facing communications research shows heavy shifts to desexed terms can confuse lay readers and risk hiding women’s specific needs.

Experts have warned that generic language like “pregnant people” may reduce visibility for women in studies and guidelines. Health codes must guide real-world practice among busy clinicians and families. Plain, sex-accurate words lower error and protect trust in the rules.

How To Judge The Tradeoff

Two tests can keep both truth and care intact. First, does the rule say who needs what when sex changes risk? If yes, use “women” where biology drives the point. Second, does the rule also need to cover a small group whose care would be missed if the text says “women” only?

If yes, pair terms or add a clear clause. “Women and other patients who can be pregnant” is longer, but it signals scope without erasing sex or people at the margins.

On balance, the facts show a real shift in wording within Pennsylvania’s draft health regulations. The dispute is not about whether pregnancy involves women. It is about whether code text should address every case in neutral terms, and what that does to clarity.

Americans prioritize plain language, biological reality, and family-centered care. Any final rule should protect those anchors while ensuring that no patient falls through the cracks due to a language gap.

Sources:

lifesitenews.com, glensidelocal.com, dailywire.com, law.justia.com, palegis.us, pa.gov, americanfaith.com, aclupa.org, law.nyu.edu, patch.com

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After-Birth Abortion Is Already Here. It Just Arrived With a Medical Name


If She May End It at 38 Weeks, Why Not at 8 Months? The Argument Nobody Will Finish

Last week, in a Bronx courtroom that drew almost no cameras, Judge Audrey Stone found Dimone Fleming not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect for stabbing her sons, Daishawn Fleming, 3, and Octavius Canada, 11 months old, to death. The prosecution stipulated to postpartum psychosis. Fleming will not go to prison. She remains in custody for a psychiatric evaluation and returns to court this month. Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Wichman explained afterward that “prosecuting mothers does not and cannot prevent these crimes from happening, but public discourse might.” The New York Times recorded the outcome in a single clause: she will avoid prison.

This morning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a jury of nine women and three men is back for a fifth day on the case of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, on January 24, 2023. She does not deny the acts. She denies responsibility for them. The Commonwealth says she sent her husband out of the house and carried out a plan. On Tuesday, the jurors told Judge William Sullivan they were unable to reach a unanimous decision, and he sent them back to keep working. Outside the courthouse, supporters in pink have treated her as the injured party, and a fundraiser for her family has drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Eighteen days before the Fleming ruling, Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, stripping the Massachusetts 24-week abortion limit and leaving late pregnancy to a physician’s “professional judgment.” So the same commonwealth that will not mark a line at a viable unborn child is now asking twelve jurors whether three deadborn children amount to a crime or a medical episode. The jurors’ hesitation is not a failure of nerve. It is what happens when a culture has spent a generation teaching that a child’s claim on life yields when the child depends on a mother who no longer accepts the cost.

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 essay remains the most cited philosophical defense of abortion in the English-speaking world. She granted the fetus full personhood and argued anyway. Her case is the unconscious violinist strapped to your kidneys for nine months. You may unplug him, she said, even though he will die, because a right to life is not a right to the use of another person’s body against that person’s will. The argument does not turn on whether the violinist is human. It turns on whether you may be forced to keep him alive with your own tissue, sleep, and time.

A born child still lives off his mother, on her breasts or on the wages she earns for formula, on her sleep and her attention, and when those give out, on her sanity. The late fetus needs her to keep existing. The 8-month-old needs her to work, on purpose, every few hours through the night. If the moral fact doing the work in Thomson’s essay is unwanted dependence, delivery does not shrink that fact. It enlarges it. Postpartum depression, which afflicts roughly 1 in 8 American mothers, and postpartum psychosis, which occurs in 1 to 2 of every 1,000 births, are the mother’s body and mind refusing that dependence in clinical form rather than in a slogan. The slogan “my body” was never, examined closely, a claim about a uterus. It was a claim about who can be required to keep another human being alive.

That is why the implication is ugly and why it keeps getting restated in journals rather than on campaign literature. A society that permits a woman to end her child’s life before birth because the child depends on her has not produced a principle that stops at the cord. The infant is still drawing on her body and her hours. If wantedness and burden were enough in the womb, they remain enough in the crib, and postpartum psychosis is precisely the kind of psychological break in which the burden becomes, for the mother, unbearable.

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva said this in the Journal of Medical Ethics without much throat-clearing. “Killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be,” they wrote, including cases in which the newborn is healthy, and only “the well-being of the family is at risk.” They coined the term “after-birth abortion” so no reader could pretend they meant palliative care. If “economical, social or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone,” they added, then “people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.” Postpartum psychosis is a psychological circumstance. A newborn is offspring. Peter Singer had already supplied the ranking that makes the conclusion feel tidy, holding that human infants are not persons and that a newborn’s life is worth less than a pig’s.

The usual reply is that birth is a bright legal line and that what I have just described is already a crime. The reply is weaker than lawyers like to admit. The United Kingdom’s Infanticide Act of 1938 charges a mother who kills her child under 12 months while “the balance of her mind was disturbed” by birth or lactation with infanticide rather than murder, and prison is rare while hospital orders are the norm. Roughly two dozen countries run a version of that statute. The Boston Globe, covering Clancy on August 1, called the US an “outlier in prosecuting infanticide,” which is a polite way of saying that American juries and prosecutors are late to a settlement much of Europe reached before the Second World War. Illinois has already written postpartum depression and psychosis into its sentencing code as a statutory mitigator, at 730 ILCS 5/5-5-3.1(a)(17), after Public Act 100-0574. Massachusetts advocates spent this summer pushing H.1924 to import the same logic, requiring expert screening for mothers charged within a year of birth and treating the diagnosis as a reason to reduce a sentence.

The federal record is not a hypothetical either. On January 23, 2025, the House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act 217 to 204, with a single Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, voting yes. The White House said the bill would “protect the most vulnerable and prevent infanticide.” Senate cloture had failed the day before, 52-47, with every Democrat present voting no. The Heritage Foundation has spent years pointing out that CDC and state reports already record infants who survive abortion attempts and then do not receive ordinary care. A party that will not require that care for a child who has already been born, and who survived an attempt on his life, has answered the personhood question in the only register that counts. Governor Ralph Northam said in 2019 that after a live delivery the infant “would be kept comfortable,” resuscitated only “if that’s what the mother and the family desired,” and that then “a discussion would ensue.” A discussion, with a living newborn in the room, about whether the newborn continues. That is after-birth abortion spoken by a sitting governor, and the country treated it as a gaffe that expired in a news cycle.

No legislature will pass a bill titled the Infanticide Permission Act, because it does not have to. It needs findings of no criminal responsibility, hospital orders instead of verdicts, statutory mitigators, juries that cannot agree, and a prosecutor of two dead boys who offers public discourse as the remedy. The practice is already here. It arrived through diagnosis rather than through a floor speech.

I do not accept the premise that got us here. Thomson’s violinist is a stranger strapped to you by an accident you did not choose. A son or a daughter is not a stranger, and the duty that follows birth is not a kidney you may disconnect because the night has become unbearable. The inferences from Thomson to Giubilini to a Bronx courtroom are tidy, which is why the starting point cannot be kept. Daishawn Fleming was 3 years old. Octavius Canada was 11 months old. Cora Clancy was 5, Dawson was 3, and Callan was 8 months. No diagnosis, no statute, and no rally in pink turns those names into a footnote about somebody else’s suffering. Unlimited abortion is wrong for the same reason the quieter sequel is wrong: a small human being’s life does not belong to anyone else’s convenience, comfort, or crisis, however genuine the crisis may be.

Polymarket prediction market

We have ended roughly 67 million lives since Roe, and that figure is almost certainly conservative because the newer counts leave out self-managed medication abortions obtained outside the formal US health-care system. National Right to Life and the Charlotte Lozier Institute, working from Guttmacher’s own revisions, have been raising the cumulative total as the clinic and telehealth numbers were restated upward. This was a national commitment made without a single election that ever put the full cost on the ballot in those terms. Meanwhile the general fertility rate in the US has fallen to record lows near 53 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, and a country that cannot talk itself into having children should at least stop talking itself into discarding the ones already here, the collapse is not a mystery of economics alone when the official ethic keeps teaching that a child’s claim is negotiable the moment the child becomes costly. We need more babies, more households that can stand a crying night, and more neighbors who notice when a new mother is coming apart. If more mothers are reaching the point where they cannot stop themselves from killing their own children, the answer is not to rename the killing after the fact. The answer is to reach them beforehand to build the screening, the family, the church and the block that catch a woman before psychosis takes the wheel. Save the mothers if we can, but the children are not a remainder.

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Time To Cut The Cord: Why Public Broadcasting No Longer Deserves Our Tax Dollars


The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 should be repealed. Why should American taxpayers continue funding a relic of the past when today we have unlimited access to diverse media options at our fingertips? With more than 1,000 television channels, streaming services and endless online content, is there really a need for publicly funded broadcasting in this modern landscape? What was once seen as a necessary initiative for diversifying the media landscape has devolved into a relic of an earlier age—a $2 billion handout benefiting only a small, elite audience. When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation, Americans faced a scarcity of options: four television channels and limited radio programming, often constrained by corporate interests or regional limitations. There was an argument to be made that there was a public need for diversified and educational content. Fast forward to today, the notion of scarcity is laughable. Americans enjoy an overwhelming array of choices, from the internet and streaming services to podcasts, YouTube channels and digital news outlets—all of which have replaced the once-venerated public broadcasting model.

And yet, here we are, funding a bloated Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that receives approximately $525 million annually from the federal government, sending most of it down the bureaucratic chain to National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and roughly 1,500 local affiliates. For instance, local stations often receive funding that must then be funneled back to NPR or PBS to cover the costs of syndicated content, leaving little room for truly local programming or innovation. This results in a top-heavy structure where national priorities overshadow community needs and creativity is stifled by bureaucratic constraints. These taxpayer funds support an organization that’s become little more than a publicly subsidized echo chamber for liberal ideas—a taxpayer-funded sandbox for the rich, white liberal elite who can comfortably afford alternative sources of information. Statistically, the audience for public broadcasting is disproportionately affluent, overwhelmingly white and markedly liberal, with fewer than 17% of viewers identifying as Republicans. This means that 80% of America—including those struggling to make ends meet, those from minority communities and those who don’t share a progressive worldview—are effectively subsidizing the content consumption of a privileged minority.

The “public” spirit behind public broadcasting has clearly eroded. As audience demographics shifted over the decades, so too did the programming, drifting away from the balanced ideals that once defined it. This shift starts at the top, with leadership steering the ideological course. Take for example NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher, who has previously stated that “her biggest obstacle in her fight against disinformation is the First Amendment in the United States, which makes it a little bit tricky to censor bad information and the influence peddlers who spread it.” Such perspectives from top leadership reflect and perpetuate the current direction of public broadcasting. During the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, shows like The McLaughlin Group, Firing Line and MacNeil/Lehrer Report actively cultivated an environment of political balance. William F. Buckley Jr. debated liberals with eloquence and vigor, while Jim Lehrer ensured his news programming gave equal weight to both sides of every political coin. This was public broadcasting at its finest: genuine dialogue, real debate and a respect for the full spectrum of American thought. Fast forward to today, and that ideal has been abandoned. Conservative voices are persona non grata in the public broadcasting realm. The transformation culminated with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which seemed to shatter the public broadcasting model’s already fragile pretense of impartiality. Republican perspectives were deemed dangerous, and even the mere platforming of a Trump supporter was anathema. Public broadcasting became, and remains, an exclusive club for ideological uniformity.

Consider the case of Uri Berliner, a veteran journalist who dedicated 25 years to NPR, serving as a senior business editor. In April 2024, Berliner authored an essay titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” where he criticized NPR for adopting a progressive worldview and lacking viewpoint diversity. He cited instances such as the handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the origins of COVID-19 as evidence of bias. Following the publication of his essay, Berliner was suspended for five days without pay for failing to secure approval for outside work. Subsequently, he resigned, stating he could not work in a newsroom where he felt disparaged by the new CEO. This incident underscores the intolerance for internal dissent within public broadcasting. The message was clear: there is no room for dissent. If public broadcasting cannot uphold even the pretense of ideological diversity, why should it continue to be funded by taxpayers who don’t share its worldview?

Moreover, let’s scrutinize the opaque and convoluted way in which federal dollars flow through public broadcasting. The CPB receives around $525 million from the government, and this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Additional funding filters in through the Departments of Commerce and Education—amounting to another $500 million. These funds then disperse across various entities, obfuscating the total expenditure. What eventually trickles down to the American viewer is a complex web of grants, subsidies, and donations that ensures NPR, PBS, and their affiliates remain flush with cash. Yet, even with this largesse, their ratings remain woefully anemic, with only about 20% of Americans tuning in. Of those, the majority belong to the same cohort of wealthy, liberal and overwhelmingly white individuals who already have the means to afford premium news subscriptions. This isn’t public service; it’s public indulgence.

We must address the crux of the issue: why should taxpayers continue to fund a platform that serves such a narrow slice of America, particularly when that slice doesn’t represent the nation’s full diversity—neither demographically nor ideologically? Public broadcasting could easily adapt, were it forced to stand on its own two feet. It could charge subscription fees like HBO or Peacock. It could run more advertising, sell more memberships or, heaven forbid, even trim its bloated budget. Defunding public broadcasting doesn’t spell the end of NPR, PBS or their affiliates. It simply removes the unfair burden from those who receive nothing in return. In a market-driven landscape, those who value the service could sustain it, and those who don’t wouldn’t be compelled to pay for it.

Public broadcasting defenders often argue that this is about protecting the cultural commons—ensuring that educational and high-quality content is accessible to all. But this argument is no longer tenable. In today’s digital age, there is no shortage of educational content. If anything, the challenge is sorting through the deluge of material available at our fingertips. Podcasts, YouTube channels, MOOCs and countless other platforms offer educational programming across every conceivable discipline. If you want to learn, you can, and without a government handout.

I speak not from ignorance or disdain but from disappointment. I once supported my local public broadcasting station. I contributed to my PBS affiliate, valuing the balance and thoughtfulness that public broadcasting promised. But that promise has been broken. Now, each time I tune in, I’m met with bias, with narrative-driven content that caters not to truth but to ideology. The federal government should not be in the business of funding media—especially not media that functions as an arm of a single political faction. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had its moment in history, and it served its purpose. But times have changed, and so must we. Public broadcasting as we know it today is unworthy of the American taxpayer’s dollar. Let the marketplace decide its fate.

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Never, EVER Talk to Police and Especially If You Are Innocent. Not A Peep, Grunt, Nod, Yes, No, Etc. NOTHING But Neutral Silence and Stance While Also Expressing with Emphasis This Same Advice to Family, Friends and Neighbors If Ever Approached for Information About You as Well. They Are Also NOT Obliged to Communicate Either.


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

James Duane, a professor at Regent University School of Law, once gave a lecture with a deliberately provocative title, “Don’t Talk to the Police.” The title sounds extreme, even antisocial. It seems to counsel guilt, evasion, or hostility to lawful authority. Yet the argument Duane develops is none of these things. It is instead a sober analysis of how modern criminal procedure actually works, not how we wish it worked. When examined carefully, the conclusion he reaches is not merely defensible but compelling. Under current U.S. law, the rational course of action for any person, guilty or innocent, is to decline to answer police questions and to request a lawyer. This is not a loophole. It is the logic of the Fifth Amendment taken seriously.

Don't Talk to the Police
Regent Law Professor James Duane gives viewers startling reasons why they should always exercise their Fifth Amendment rights when questioned by government officials.

Begin with the most basic misconception. Many people believe that talking can help them avoid arrest. They imagine that if they can just explain themselves, the officer will see their innocence and let them go. But police encounters do not begin in a neutral epistemic posture. Officers approach because they already suspect wrongdoing or because they are tasked with finding it. Their professional incentive is not to be persuaded by your narrative but to establish probable cause. This is not a moral criticism. It is a description of the job. As officers themselves openly acknowledge, a strong case is one with admissions. Confessions are not a bonus; they are the objective. Talking does not remove suspicion; it supplies material with which suspicion is formalized.

Even if arrest could theoretically be avoided through explanation, the structure of evidence law makes talking a one-way bet. Statements you make to police can almost always be used against you. Statements that help you are usually inadmissible in your favor. This is not intuitive to laypeople, but it is fundamental. Your exculpatory remarks are typically classified as your own out-of-court statements and, therefore, hearsay if you later attempt to introduce them. The prosecution, by contrast, can introduce your incriminating statements through the officer who heard them. The asymmetry is stark. Speaking hands the state admissible evidence while preserving nothing comparable for you. Silence preserves the status quo. Talking degrades it.

Consider next the case of actual guilt. Here, moral intuition often overwhelms strategic reasoning. People say one should confess for the sake of conscience or closure. But criminal law is not a sacrament. It is an adversarial system in which leverage matters. Almost all cases resolve through plea negotiations. That process is precisely where responsibility, remorse, restitution, and cooperation can be weighed in exchange for concessions. An immediate confession forfeits that leverage for nothing. Worse, even partial admissions can rescue a weak case. Evidence degrades. Witnesses disappear. Officers retire or relocate. Uncertainty is the defendant’s only bargaining chip, and confessing gives it away.

The harder and more unsettling point concerns innocence. It feels perverse to say that innocent people should fear talking more than guilty ones. Yet the data on wrongful convictions shows exactly this. A substantial portion of exonerated defendants made incriminating statements, confessed, or pled guilty. These are not abstract statistics. They reflect predictable psychological pressures. Interrogations are long. They are stressful. They exploit fatigue, confusion, and the human desire to cooperate. Suspects are fed details, assured that honesty will help, and persuaded that they are assisting in identifying the real culprit. Juries, meanwhile, treat confessions as uniquely probative. Once a confession exists, other evidence is interpreted through it. Innocence becomes an uphill argument.

Even without outright coercion, the risk of error is enormous. Perfect recall under pressure is a fantasy. Innocent people misremember times, distances, and sequences. They speak too broadly. They fill gaps. They guess. When any detail later turns out to be wrong, the narrative shifts from mistake to deception. A small inconsistency becomes evidence of consciousness of guilt. The problem is not lying. It is being human. The law, however, is unforgiving of ordinary cognitive limits when they are narrated by an officer in uniform reading from notes.

Truth itself can incriminate. This is perhaps the most philosophically important point, and it explains why the Fifth Amendment protects the innocent. You can answer every question honestly and still help complete the prosecution’s puzzle. Admitting dislike can supply motive. Describing a prior argument can establish intent. Placing yourself near a location can narrow opportunity. None of this requires falsehood. It requires only that your truthful statements be combined with other evidence you may not even know exists. The privilege against self-incrimination is not a license to lie. It is a recognition that truth can be dangerous when the state controls the narrative.

That narrative control is institutional, not personal. Police notes and testimony carry structural credibility. In court, the defendant sits beside a lawyer, already marked as someone who needs defending. The officer appears as a professional witness. When the officer recounts the defendant’s own words, recorded and framed through official notes, the story acquires an aura of objectivity. Even when no one lies, the system privileges one version over the other. Disputes about what was said rarely end in the defendant’s favor.

Talking also creates new crimes. When investigators cannot prove the underlying allegation, they often pursue charges for false statements, obstruction, or inconsistency. High-profile examples are not anomalies. They illustrate a rule. Once you speak, you are exposed to liability not only for what you did but for how accurately you recount it. Police are legally permitted to deceive during questioning. You are not permitted to be wrong. This is not an even exchange.

All of this occurs against the backdrop of an unlevel playing field by design. Modern criminal law is vast. Ordinary citizens routinely violate technical rules without knowing it. Silence is uncomfortable. People want to tell their story. Officers are trained to exploit that impulse. Time favors the state. The suspect wants to leave. The officer is content to wait. The environment is engineered to extract statements, not to neutrally discover truth.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive danger arises with alibis. A truthful alibi seems like the strongest form of exculpation. Yet if any evidence later contradicts it, even mistakenly, the alibi becomes a lie in the eyes of the jury. The prosecution gains a powerful narrative of deception layered on top of the original charge. What would have been a thin case becomes a compelling one, built largely from the defendant’s own words.

The conclusion follows with uncomfortable clarity. Speaking to police is volunteering to play an away game under rules you did not write and cannot change. Your helpful statements are unlikely to help you later. Your harmful statements can be used immediately. Your memory will be imperfect. The officer’s notes will be authoritative. Even truth can be weaponized. The rational response is not defiance but restraint.

Identify yourself if required by law. Then say you are invoking your right to remain silent and that you want a lawyer. Then stop talking. This advice is not cynical. It is constitutional realism. The Fifth Amendment is not an admission of guilt. It is an acknowledgment of how power, incentives, and human cognition actually operate. Taking it seriously means using it or facing the ugly consequences of ignoring it and not putting it into practice. Period. End of story. Full stop already. You have preciously been warned.

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