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.