You've been conned again.
"Less mass shootings under Trump!"
—
Ron Tusler on Sunday, August 4th, 2019 in a Facebook post
Pants on Fire: State rep claims mass shootings are down under Trump
...Wisconsin
state Rep. Ron Tusler was on Facebook claiming mass shootings are down under
President Donald Trump.
"Less mass shootings under Trump! His base doesn't hate anyone," declared Tusler, R-Harrison, in a since-deleted post. The text accompanied a re-posting of a chart shared by another person that showed 24 mass shootings under
President Barack Obama and four shootings under Trump. That’s quite the disparity.
Tusler’s claim is ridiculous on multiple fronts. For one, the data it references is badly outdated. The chart in Tusler’s post is pulled from a Spring 2018 article in
National Affairs, a quarterly journal from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
The broader issue with both the chart and Tusler’s claim is the use of raw numbers to compare one partial term under Trump to two full terms under Obama.
Simple tallies will, of course, be larger over a longer time period. So what are those tallies? And how does Tusler’s claim about less shootings hold up to a better comparison, such as mass shootings per year?
Mass shootings since 1981