Peter Neronha Turned a Gun Crimes Report into a Political Ad
Peter Neronha’s 2025 Gun Crimes Report does not read like a sober public accounting. It opens by invoking two horrific shootings, says the trauma “cannot be quantified,” dismisses whether gun crimes rose or fell as “almost a moot point,” and then pivots straight into a sales pitch for “common sense gun laws.” That is not a neutral introduction to a statutory report. That is emotional priming. It is propaganda by design, built to make Rhode Islanders feel fear first and ask questions later.
This is supposed to be a fact-based report, not an advocacy brochure. Rhode Island law requires the Attorney General to provide totals, dispositions, docket numbers, charges, sentences, fines, and firearm categories. Instead, Neronha’s office openly says it included “additional details beyond what is required” to “illustrate our commitment.” That sentence gives the game away. This was never just about presenting data. It was about packaging that data inside a political message.
Magazine Capacities
The most blatant overstatement comes in the section on Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island. The report tells readers the office was “successfully defending” the magazine ban against a challenge that reached the Supreme Court. That wording is deliberately slippery. What actually happened is that the state defeated a request for preliminary relief in the First Circuit, and the Supreme Court later denied certiorari. The district court case is still active, with a last known filing on January 15, 2026 and discovery dates continuing over the next few months. In plain English, Neronha did not win the case. He survived an early injunction fight and then took a victory lap while the litigation remained alive.
Then there are the numbers themselves, and this is where the report really starts to fall apart. The headline figure is that statewide gun cases rose from 415 in 2024 to 498 in 2025, an increase of 83. But the same report shows magazine cases rising from 246 to 320 in the 11 to 30 category and from 58 to 64 in the 30 plus category. That is a combined increase of 80. In other words, nearly the entire statewide increase the Attorney General is waving around appears to come from magazine charges under the new law that sits at the center of the very lawsuit he pretends is effectively over. Strip out that category spike, and the grand narrative of a broader surge starts looking a lot less impressive.
It gets worse. On one page the report labels the category as cases involving magazines with capacity “11 to 30+.” On another, it describes 320 cases involving magazines with capacity “between 11 to 30 rounds.” Those are not the same description. If this office wants the public to treat its report as a serious statistical document, it should at least be able to define its own categories consistently from one page to the next. Sloppy labels are a warning sign. They suggest a document built for messaging first and precision second.
Violent Crimes?
For all the chest beating about violent crime, the report’s own “By the Numbers” pages are remarkably silent where it matters most. Readers get counts for statewide cases, Providence County cases, multiple firearms, ghost guns, magazines, and straw purchasing. What they do not get is a clean breakdown of murders, robberies, assaults, shootings, or other violent firearm charges. That omission is impossible to miss. If the point was truly to show the public a transparent picture of violent crime, those numbers would be front and center. Instead, the report leans on the language of violent crime while spotlighting categories that are politically useful.
That is the real story here. Neronha took a legally required reporting exercise and turned it into a curated narrative. He framed the opening with fear, stretched a live court fight into a claimed success, used a contested magazine law to drive the headline increase, and talked endlessly about violent crime without actually putting violent crime charge data at the center of the presentation. This is not just spin. It is a deliberate attempt to sell policy through selective framing while wearing the costume of an objective government report.
Conclusion
This is only the opening shot. The spreadsheet behind Neronha’s report is public, and Para Bellum Provisions has already begun pulling more relevant data from the court databases to put these numbers in their full and proper context. That work is now underway, case by case, to separate political theater from legal reality and show Rhode Islanders the true story behind Neronha’s propaganda report.
Sources
The RI AG’s office publishes the annual gun crime reports and data on their website. You can go and look at it for yourself.
https://riag.ri.gov/about-our-office/annual-reports/annual-gun-crimes-report