It was an object lesson in the politics of crime.

After President Trump called Washington a city of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and summoned the National Guard and the F.B.I. to patrol its streets, his opponents on the left reacted with righteous indignation.

They called the move a cynical move to exploit a crime crisis that they say does not exist, in a city where violent crime is at a 30-year low.

But whatever the statistics say, polls consistently show that many people in the nation’s capital — including in communities that typically vote Democratic — are deeply concerned about public safety. That makes downplaying street crime politically perilous.

Mr. Trump’s opponents had walked into a trap. But it’s one that Republicans had also faced only a few days earlier.

A succession of high-profile shootings in broad daylight — on Park Avenue, outside the Centers for Disease Control, at a Target parking lot in Texas — drew attention and sparked anxiety this summer.

Each led to familiar calls for assault weapon bans and other gun safety laws from the political left. It is a message that politicians on the right have long struggled to rebut, even though the statistics are on their side: mass shootings make up a tiny portion of gun crimes, and recent data from the Gun Violence Archive show that such shootings are falling nearly to prepandemic levels. (There were well over 600 mass shootings annually during the peak pandemic years; more than halfway through 2025, there have been 271.)