Whenever the federal government has the power to publish statistics concerning crime, the opportunities for abuse only magnify. A bombshell report by RealClear Investigations highlighted the FBI’s quiet move to change its crime report for 2022 and beyond. The FBI report was a topic of contention during former President Donald Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10, 2024.
Trump attacked Harris for being soft on crime in the debate. “Crime is through the roof,” Trump proclaimed, taking aim at the Biden regime’s flaccid crime policies. Debate moderator David Muir came to Harris’ defense by using the FBI’s official data to demonstrate that crime has been dropping under President Joe Biden’s watch. “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” Muir noted.
Democrats and their liberal media boosters subsequently mocked Trump for his remarks about the country’s crime rate. However, Dr. John Lott, America’s eminent pro-gun academic, penned a report at RealClear Investigations entitled “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats” that set the record straight on the FBI’s crime report. Initially, the FBI reported that violent crime decreased by 2.1%. Lott’s report discovered that crime had actually increased by 4.5%, thereby vindicating Trump’s remarks in the September debate.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats and their liberal allies have remained quiet about this report. They clearly don’t want to admit they were wrong in their assessment of the United States’ violent crime rate, and most importantly, they don’t want to admit that the FBI effectively fabricated data to maintain a squeaky-clean image for the Biden regime. National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty observed that the revised FBI data “includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.”
Lott noted that the FBI data changes have been nothing short of breathtaking: “The actual changes in crimes are extensive. The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?”
The most frightening aspect of Lott’s report is how steep the increase in violent crime has been since Joe Biden took office in January 2021, once the FBI adjusted its data. He observed:
“While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by 55.4%. Rapes are up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during Biden’s term. Since the NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey) started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27% in 2006, so the increase under Biden was slightly more than twice as large.”
A once respected institution, the FBI has become just another government agency that has grown detached from the will of the people. It has become a despotic agency that selectively persecutes enemies of the regime — be they January 6 protestors, gun owners, pro-life advocates, etc. — while letting real criminals operate with virtual impunity. At this point, gun owners must come to grips with the fact that the DC bureaucracy is overwhelmingly against their way of life.
Not only will repealing federal gun control become a political necessity, but the absolute dismantling of the federal bureaucracy must also be pursued for the Second Amendment to be fully restored and enjoyed by our posterity.
