Donald Trump was wrong – knife crime in London has nothing to do with the case against gun control

This ought to be so obvious, yet there are large numbers of Americans who seem impervious to it: if London gangs had guns instead of knives, the numbers of deaths and the severity of the injuries would be far worse

Donald Trump’s ignorant remark about knife crime in London hardly deserves a response, but unfortunately it is not possible to deny the president of the United States the oxygen of publicity.

So let us say that Mr Trump’s words to a National Rifle Association conference in Dallas were shockingly mistaken. He said that “a once very prestigious hospital” in the middle of London is “like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds”.

There are two surprising things about this statement. One is that it is merely an absurd exaggeration, as opposed to a flat-out untruth. The other is that Mr Trump was partly repeating the comments of a British doctor, as reported in the British media.

Martin Griffiths, a surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, was interviewed by the BBC last month about the rise in stabbings in the capital. He said: “Some of my military colleagues have described the practice here as similar to being at Bastion, which is a very worrying comment to hear” – referring to Camp Bastion, the British Forces base in Afghanistan.

While we can understand that doctors might want to shock people for the best of motives in order to draw attention to a problem, they need to beware the dangers of such colourful comparisons.

Mr Griffiths is not responsible for President Trump’s graphic imagination – “there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital”. Nor can he do much about right-wing American myths about the NHS, with its imaginary “death panels” and primitive standards. But he ought to be careful about giving the impression that London hospitals offer the kind of care seen in developing countries.

The part of President Trump’s comments that was untrue and inexcusable, however, was his attempt to use this dubious anecdote to make the case against stricter gun control in the US. He said that London “has unbelievably tough gun laws”, and that “they don’t have guns, they have knives”. That was the reason, he said, “it’s as bad as a military war zone hospital”.

This ought to be so obvious, and yet there are large numbers of Americans who seem impervious to it: if London gangs had guns instead of knives, the numbers of deaths and the severity of the injuries seen in London A&E departments would be far worse.

We should not be complacent – and indeed the British media’s reporting of knife crime could not be accused of that failing – because there has been an increase in stabbings recently.

But in the US, five times as many people are murdered every year as in the UK, accounting for the size of our populations. Most of them die by shooting. President Trump needs to look closer to home.