“If gun control was truly effective in reducing crime, the U.S. Virgin Islands would be one of the safest places in the nation. Instead, the U.S. territory, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws around, has a homicide rate that’s even higher than Mexico,” notes Cam Edwards. “The U.S. Virgin Island’s gun laws are extensive. A permit is required to purchase both firearms and ammunition, and you can be sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing a single round of ammunition without a valid permit. You must also be at least 21 before you can apply for a license. The territory bans so-called assault weapons and ‘large capacity’ magazines.”
Yet despite all those restrictions, the Virgin Islands “remains one of the most homicide-plagued places on earth,” notes a newspaper there:
The rate has hovered near or above 50 per 100 000 — on par with Jamaica and four times higher than notoriously violent Mexico — for much of the last 20 years, according to data from Macrotrends homicide-rate series 1997-2025, VIPD statements for 2010 record and 2022-23 counts, CDC FastStats U.S. homicide rate 2022, and UNODC & World Population Review global and country homicide rankings 2022.
So far for 2025, the USVI has experienced 22 homicides, 11 on St. Croix, 9 on St. Thomas and 2 on St. John, putting the territory on pace for another record year.
That’s “the highest homicide rate for any U.S. state or territory,” notes Edwards. “It’s also about ten times higher than the overall homicide rate for the United States.” He adds that “like many Democrat-controlled locales, the U.S. Virgin Islands has established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The office, which has been in place since 2019, clearly hasn’t been successful in preventing much gun violence, and when executive director Antonio Emmanuel appeared before a legislative panel this week to talk about the high homicide rate he didn’t have much of an answer.”
Despite the sky-high homicide rate, the gun prevention office’s executive director says that he doesn’t think current policy is at fault. “I think that we have folks that are committing crimes, some by emotional outbursts, some because they have an ax to grind with somebody else. These are retaliatory homicides. People have issues with somebody else, or one person claims he got disrespected, or we have some domestic violence issues,” he added.“We have a community that is clearly angry, clearly frustrated,” Mr. Emmanuel declared. “The homicides that we’re having now, like I said, they’re directed, they’re personal attacks on each other.” His office is “educating” the community on de-escalation and conflict resolution. But “unfortunately, some of the older perpetrators of the crime aren’t getting that information,” Mr. Emmanuel admitted.
The governor of the Virgin Islands, by contrast, recently recognized that restricting gun possession by law-abiding people can be counterproductive. As Edwards notes, “Earlier this year, when the governor was asked about gun smuggling into the territory, the Democrat offered up a surprising and refreshing take: quit making it so difficult to legally get a gun.” “The states with the toughest gun laws get the highest homicide rates,” he admitted. “I think we should move to a place where we open gun ranges that are legal and we make it easier for people to license and carry firearms,” Governor Bryan added. He believes the fraction of Virgin Islanders who carry unregistered weapons for reasons of ill-intent is very small, while most residents carry firearms because “they’re trying to protect themselves, or feel protected.” According to a news report, “Governor Bryan says the current restrictive regime only serves to criminalize many young Virgin Islanders seeking to exercise their second amendment rights. He told a story about a man with no previous criminal record, who was jailed for 15 years without parole after pleading guilty to gun and ammunition charges.”
Other places in the U.S. that adopted strict gun control didn’t experience declines in homicide, either, as we noted back in 2015:
As Howard Portnoy noted earlier, some countries that ban or heavily restrict guns have higher rates of mass shootings than the U.S. does. Yet, in discussing the recent college murders in Roseburg, Oregon, President Obama falsely claimed we need more gun regulations because “states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.”
As a Washington Post fact-checker notes, the president’s claim was based on a misleading August 28 National Journal article by Libby Isenstein that has been touted by gun-control groups. That article bizarrely excluded many states with low homicide rates and few gun laws in reaching the conclusion that “the states with the most gun laws” have “the fewest gun-related deaths” while “states with fewer regulations typically have a much higher death rate from guns.”
The National Journal disproportionately excluded low-crime, pro-gun states such as Vermont, South Dakota, and Maine from its chart of homicide rates precisely because their homicide rate was low. These states have few gun laws (Vermont has the least of any state) and very low homicide rates. If you disproportionately exclude unregulated states that are safest from the calculation of which states have the lowest homicide rates, that will create the false impression that states with the most gun laws have the fewest gun deaths.
These “pro-gun” states have low homicide rates (for example, Vermont had the third lowest homicide rate in 2013, the lowest gun murder rate in 2010, and the second-lowest gun murder rate in 2007-2010. South Dakota had the fourth-lowest gun-homicide rate in 2007-2010).
But in its discussions of “Concealed Carry” and “Background Checks,” the National Journal deletes these states from its charts comparing pro-gun and anti-gun states by “Gun-related homicides per 100,000 people, by state (2013).” It deletes Vermont, South Dakota, Maine, and 8 other states (6 of which have few gun regulations) from each chart, claiming that these states had “too few homicides to calculate a reliable rate.” 9 of the 11 states excluded broadly allow concealed carry and do not impose additional background-check requirements beyond those contained in federal law. But the National Journal deliberately excluded those states, writing, “In 2013, Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming had too few homicides to calculate a reliable rate.”
It is truly bizarre to exclude the states with the fewest gun deaths from an article about what states have “the fewest gun deaths.” This is an egregious act of cherry-picking.
But that was apparently how the National Journal managed to claim that “the states that impose the most restrictions on gun users also have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths, while states with fewer regulations typically have a much higher death rate from guns.” (In 2013, the state with the nation’s lowest murder rate and lowest rate of gun-related homicides was Iowa, which is middling in terms of the number of gun laws. In 2007-2010, it ranked fifth-lowest in number of gun-related homicides. It does not have the “most gun laws.” It broadly permits concealed carry but also requires certain background checks. For some reason, the National Journal left Iowa in, while excluding other low-homicide, low-crime states like Vermont that have even fewer gun laws.).
The “pro-gun” states that consistently have higher “gun-related homicide” rates – such as Louisiana and South Carolina — have higher violent crime rates of all kinds, not just homicides or gun-related homicides. So it does not appear to be related to their gun laws. (For example, Louisiana and South Carolina have higher rates of non-gun-related homicide as well).
Other “pro-gun” states that have higher-than-average “gun-related deaths” than average – like Idaho and Wyoming – do not have high homicide rates, but rather higher use of guns in suicide. But suicide is not what people think of when a politician claims that guns kill people. Moreover, using a gun is not the easiest way to commit suicide, and “gun-related” suicides do not necessarily add much to the number of suicides, since in the absence of guns, many people will still commit suicide.
There are very few guns in Japan, which largely bans guns, to the extent that it has been called a “land without guns.” But Japan has a much higher suicide rate than the U.S.
Many countries that ban private ownership of firearms have much higher homicide rates than the U.S., such as Mexico, which has a murder rate more than four times as high as the U.S.
Cities that heavily restrict gun sales often have high murder rates, such as Chicago.
