Brunswick Beacon, 01.11.24
Trump’s last year as president (2020) was a nightmare. His denial, mismanagement, hostility to masking, and promotion of quack cures (hydroxychloroquine, bleach) gave America the most COVID-19 infections and deaths in the world and the highest excess mortality rate among comparable countries. Unemployment hit 14.7%, the highest level since the Great Depression. Murder rates soared 30% from 2019 to 2020 — the largest single-year increase in modern history.
The good news is that thanks to President Biden 2023 had one of the lowest rates of violent crime in more than 50 years. Murders have seen “one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded,” said U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. "We're seeing double-digit declines in homicide across nearly 70 of America's largest cities," based on newly released FBI data.
"It’s historic. It's the largest one-year decline," said Jeffrey Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department. "It's cities of every size, the suburbs, rural counties, tiny cities, large cities. It's really a national decline."
Monaco called the federal government a "force multiplier" helping local law enforcement drive down murder rates by identifying and removing habitual shooters and violent offenders from the streets: "We're using tools like crime-gun intelligence, the ability to trace the gun and the spent shell casing from a crime scene to identify the shooter and how many violent crimes they've been involved with." Monaco added, “with that tool we've charged more than 300 defendants with new gun trafficking and illegal trafficking."
Police have these new tools thanks to the most significant gun safety law in 30 years: President Biden’s 2022 Safer Communities Act. Every NC Republican representative voted against it, including our congressman, David Rouzer. Rouzer’s vote would have defunded local police, schools and communities like ours by $13 billion and we’d still have the soaring murder rate Trump left behind.
Nancy Briganti
Carolina Shores