The Democratic debate last Saturday has come and gone–and Hillary is just like any other Democrat when it comes to the issue of gun violence: she’s completely and utterly wrong. Just like her former boss, she rattled off talking points that were wholly inaccurate and rested on the border of being a flat-out lie. The Associated Press couldn’t justify any of her claims (via AP) [emphasis mine]:
CLINTON: "Since we last debated in Las Vegas, nearly 3,000 people have been killed by guns. Two hundred children have been killed. This is an emergency." She said that in the same period there have been 21 mass shootings, "including one last weekend in Des Moines where three were murdered."THE FACTS: The claim appears to be unsupported on all counts.
The Gun Violence Archive has recorded 11,485 gun deaths in the U.S. so far this year, an average of just under 1,000 per month, making Clinton's figure appear to be highly exaggerated. The archive had more detailed data for children and teenagers, showing 70 from those age groups killed by firearms since the Democratic candidates debated Oct. 13 - not 200 as she claimed.
Asked to explain the discrepancy, Clinton's campaign pointed to 2013 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 2010 figures from the Children's Defense Fund. But that's not the time period she said she was talking about.
The only mass shooting recently in Des Moines was Nov. 8, when four people were shot at a night club. One was killed, not three.
Overall, violent crime has gone down across the country. That is a fact. 3,000 people were killed in the span of a month; has a civil war broken out? If Democrats want to actually engage in an educated debate on this subject, the first thing they need to do before being invited to the adults table is getting the facts right. The crime data is pretty much all there on the Department of Justice’s website.
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