BRATTLEBORO — Responding to Kevin O'Keefe's Viewpoint claiming that Donald Trump bears responsibility for the uptick in mass shootings [“We are free, we are told,” Viewpoint, Aug. 7], Gerard Cloutier kindly did a quick search of databases in order to allay our fears and to defend Donald Trump from O'Keefe's supposed unfair accusations.
However, his research was flawed.
It is true that violent crime went down from 2017 to 2018 - in fact, violent crimes have been on a slow decline since 1990.
However, his claim that the FBI's 2017 crime report showed four times as many people were killed by knives than guns is simply not true.
This internet myth is not what the FBI study showed. The 2017 FBI crime statistics reported 15,129 murders in the U.S. They did indeed report that 1,591 of those murders were committed with knives, while only 667 were with rifles or shotguns.
But those figures don't meet the total number of murders; you must continue adding on.
As it turns out, another 3,300 were murdered with unknown types of guns, while another 7,000 were shot with handguns. So your final total is 11,000 murders committed with some sort of firearm and 1,600 with knives.
The result being that almost seven times more murders were committed with guns than knives.
However this wasn't O'Keefe's point. Overall murder rates, whether by gun or knife, aren't the same thing as mass-shooting incidences.
The fact is, there has been a documented 30-percent uptick in hate crimes since Trump's election in 2016. That is huge, considering we talking about a span of only three years.
While mass-murder incidents aren't particular to Trump's reign, the number of deaths in mass shootings is double what it was in the three years prior to his election.
Combined with the dramatic increase overall in these incidences, as well as hate crimes, I think it's not just plausible but quite likely that Trump's constant belittling of “others” and overt incitement and verbal support of violence is directly linked to irrefutable increases in hate crimes and mass-shooting incidences.
In the end, we see seven times more murders with guns than knives, according to the FBI; a 30-percent uptick in hate crimes, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center; and twice the number of deaths in mass shootings in Trump's first three years in office than in the previous three years.
These verifiable, documented facts have nothing to do with what Mr. Cloutier refers to as “ramping up arguments between the political left and right.”