But in the speech, Trump didn't just paint a grim picture about the country's “carnage”; he pledged to end it — immediately. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he declared.

In fairness, Trump wasn't talking just about violence; he also referenced poverty, the decline of the manufacturing industry and an allegedly shoddy education system. All of that was apparently part of the “carnage.” But so was crime. It wasn't the only time he appeared to promise to magically end the violence almost instantly. Here's a sampling:

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So, has it?

Wonkblog's Christopher Ingraham noted back in July that gun deaths in the United States were up 12 percent compared with last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun deaths based on media reports and law enforcement records. As of today, after the tragedy in Las Vegas, the site records 11,686 gun deaths in 2017 — including 273 via mass shooting. (The archive's definition of “mass shooting” is an incident in which four or more people were shot at.)

That leaves us on track for more than 15,500 gun deaths in 2017, including more than 360 via mass shooting. If this pace continues, the total number of gun deaths would be greater than in each of the past three years, and the number of mass-shooting deaths would be only slightly less than the 383 recorded in 2016. We'd also be on track for an increase in gun injuries, from 30,615 in 2016 to more than 31,500 in 2017.

As for violent crime, it appears that the long downward trend will continue, but with only a modest decline. The Brennan Center for Justice issued a preliminary report for 2017 last month and estimated the violent crime rate in the United States' 30 largest cities would decline by just 0.6 percent this year, “essentially remaining stable.”

Trump's promise to end violent crime was always hyperbolic, and he's no stranger to over-promising and under-delivering. But he did promise to end the scourge of violence almost immediately. That claim was questionable in the first place given crime rates have long been declining (as the charts above show); now it's dubious because Trump hasn't delivered any kind of unusual reduction in his first nine months.