So do we have a gun violence problem or not?

It took Donald Trump’s “gloom and doom” acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last week to make President Obama realize that violence in the United States isn’t really as bad as he has been telling us.

For years, the President and any number of his fellow Democrats and supporters of stronger gun control laws have been telling the nation we are in the grip of something terrible. In his weekly address delivered on New Year’s Day of this year he spoke about the “epidemic of gun violence” and how he “can’t sit around and do nothing.”

{mosads}The fact sheet that accompanied his additional executive orders restricting sales of some guns a few days later mentioned the 100,000 plus people who had been killed as a result of gunshots in the past decade plus the “millions more” who had been victims of gun crimes but survived.  It discussed suicides and “hundreds of police officers shot to death protecting their communities,” and accidental shootings of children. 

All of this was clearly designed to make Americans think that gun violence was out of control. There was no mention of firearms being used to prevent crimes or the significant long-term declines in violent crime—both involving guns and not.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign website states, “We can—and must—end the epidemic of gun violence.”  On April 25, Ms. Clinton tweeted, “America’s gun violence epidemic is out of control.” She has referenced this scourge on so many occasions while campaigning that it would be impossible to count them all.

Apparently, Donald Trump was the only Republicans heeding these statements, and he took them to heart, amplified them, expanded them beyond firearms, and tried to convince Americans that the nation is in very serious trouble. President Obama has left us open to attack from enemies within and without.

The President has since discovered that things are really pretty good and crime has been in decline for some time, even prior to his presidency. The day after Trump’s speech, Obama noted “America is much less violent than it was 20 or 30 years ago,” and cited the statistics that back up that claim. Those statistics do not support any claim that there is an epidemic of violence in the country. Rather they do, and have for some time, clearly make the opposite case. Crime has been down for over two decades as both the number of firearms sales have regularly broken records and prison populations have increased. It may be “an inconvenient truth,” but it is a truth.

It will be interesting to see how the President pivots away from this statement the next time he feels the need to argue for more gun restrictions. At the same time, Secretary Clinton now must also decide: Are we a nation with an uncontrollable violence problem or are things really better? It would appear that both Obama and Clinton want to have it both ways. It’s simple for Trump; he has to stick to the Armageddon scenario because it’s the only way he can win. 

Everyone should bear in mind that each side in any argument can produce anecdotes to support their narrative. Police shoot innocent black men, black men target police on the job, and some undocumented immigrants murder and rape during their stays in the United States.

Why don’t we all just stick to the aggregated statistics and actual facts? They are out there. They just may not fit so neatly into your political ideology or that of your candidate. Maybe we could locate an objective reporter or two to aid in that endeavor. Or is that too much to ask?

Harry Wilson is a professor of public affairs at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia and the author of “The Triumph of the Gun-Rights Movement: Why the Gun Control Debate Is Over.”