US President Donald Trump likes to posit theories. He has one theory that if the teachers in American schools were all armed with guns and trained to use them, then there would be far less school shootings in the US. And as he has told the National Rifle Association in a recent speech, he believes that the record-high knife crime rates in the British capital city of London would go down if the UK let their strict gun laws loose and allowed for every British citizen to be packing firearms.
Technically, Trump is probably right. If everyone in the UK was walking around with a gun under their jacket, there would be less knife crime in London – but there would be a heck of a lot more gun crime!
He made these comments in response to a couple of things: first of all, in response to the reports that the knife crime rate in London is at an all-time high, and second of all, in response to an interview that he skimmed and missed the point of. In fact, the person whose interview he missed the point of posted a GIF on Twitter in which the text “THE POINT” flies right over an unsuspecting stick figure’s head.
London is just ‘knives, knives, knives,’ says Trump
Trump’s description of London is “knives, knives, knives,” and it’s worth mentioning that he said this while lunging his hand out like a blade. He also said that a hospital in the city – an arbitrary hospital that he did not name – was “as bad as a military war zone” in the bloodbath that was going on there.
He was getting his information from a surgery expert who had given an interview to the British press, but he wasn’t quoting him directly. The guy who Trump got his information from was Martin P. Griffiths, who was actually discussing the high levels of knife crime in London by way of saying that the knives need to be taken out of the hands of these perpetrators and these crimes need to be prevented.
But what the President of the United States has taken from that is to go completely in the other direction and suggested that what he meant was that every British person needs a gun, so that if someone comes at them with a knife, they will be able to shoot them. But surely if everyone has a gun, no one will bother with the knives anymore.
If they’re going to attack someone with a deadly weapon and guns are available, surely they’ll go with the guns. This is something that Trump singularly failed to point out during his unusual diatribe to the NRA where he roped Britain and British politics into it, in which he inaccurately quoted Griffiths as saying that “there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital” in London.
After Trump said this, one of Griffiths’ colleagues, Dr. Geraldine A. Lee, tweeted to him to jokingly ask what it felt like to be “misquoted” by a man who is “allegedly” the “most powerful man” in the entire world. Dr. Lee opened her post on social media with a lighthearted, “Love it!” There would be more weight surrounding this issue with these experts if they thought that the US President’s comments would have any bearing in some changes to the UK legislation, but Parliament has not taken any of these comments or suggestions seriously.
Police have fired back that London is very safe
According to the UK police authorities, despite the fact that the number of stabbings in London has gone up rapidly in the past few years, the city still remains one of the safest in the world. They may have been using this to fire back at Trump, or perhaps just to state some facts that are contrary to popular opinion in order to sway the public’s standpoint on the city’s crime rates. The number of annual knife crimes have only gone up marginally, anyway – they’ve gone from 4,446 incidents last year to 4,700 incidents this year. It’s not a huge difference.
