Trump Claims Murder Rate Is Highest In 45 To 47 Years

Truth is dead. Facts are dead. The New York Daily News reports:

President Trump continued his war on facts Tuesday, inaccurately claiming that the nation’s murder rate was the highest it’s been in nearly 50 years. Trump was holding a listening session with county sheriffs from across the U.S. at the White House Tuesday morning when he made the untrue statement.

Trump said that the U.S. murder rate was the highest it had been “in 45 to 47 years” — a claim he had also made on the campaign trail numerous times. According to the FBI, however, the estimated number of murders in 2015, the last year for which records are complete, was 15,696. That puts the murder rate at 4.9 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Those numbers are well below the national numbers provided by the FBI from 1970, 1971 and 1972, which would be 45 to 47 years ago, when the murder rates were 7.9, 8.6 and 9.0, per 100,000 people, respectively. In fact, the national homicide rates spiked in 1980 — at 10.2 per 100,000 people — and 1991 — at 9.8 — but have steadily declined since the latter year.