Glenn Grothman: “I would now like to address the body on the topic of the recent decline of murders in the United States of America. For…”

“I would now like to address the body on the topic of the recent decline of murders in the United States of America. For people who watch this House, we know that there are all sorts of bad things we can dwell on. We can dwell on the immigration crisis, we can dwell on high healthcare costs, we can dwell on the debt, but recently some relatively good news--we have more work to do--was brought forth, and that is the murder rates for 2018 were published. Largely in this country, murder rates skyrocketed from the early 1960s, when we had the beginning of the welfare culture, the war on the family under Lyndon Johnson, and murder rates rose from around 5 per 100,000 to over 10 per 100,000 in 1980. Murder rates stayed relatively high throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s. Since that time, I think in part because of increased incarceration, those murder rates were falling until 2015. And then, I think in part because of a government that spoke negatively of police, talked about or implied that police shootings were racially motivated, something happened opposite of what had been going on the 25 years before that. All of a sudden for 2 years in a row, the number of people murdered in this country jumped up, jumped up from a low of 4.4 to 5.4 per 100,000 in the years 2015 and 2016.…”