John Lott has a new op-ed at Fox News that discusses some of the errors in Obama’s talk on Tuesday.
With tears in his eyes, President Obama pulled out all the stops in pushing his new executive orders on gun control this week. A Washington Post headline exclaimed, “President Obama’s amazingly emotional speech on gun control.” But the president also tried to appeal to people’s minds with a barrage of factual claims.
Unfortunately, the president’s remarks had a large number of errors. Here are 11 of the false or misleading claims that the president made.
1. “But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. It doesn’t happen in other advanced countries. It’s not even close.”
Last year, both France and the US had four mass public shootings. France suffered more casualties (murders and injuries) from mass public shootings in 2015 than the US has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (524 to 396). And this occurred despite the US being five times more populous than France.
But it isn’t just the horrific year that France had last year. Far from being well below the frequency found in US, other European countries actually have a worse problem. From 2009 through December 2015, eleven European countries experienced mass public shootings at a greater frequency than did the US, after adjusting for population. These countries include Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.
President Obama’s statement is clearly false.
2. Five years ago this week, a sitting member of Congress and 18 others were shot at, at a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. It wasn’t the first time I had to talk to the nation in response to a mass shooting, nor would it be the last. Fort Hood. Binghamton. Aurora. Oak Creek. Newtown. The Navy Yard. Santa Barbara. Charleston. San Bernardino. . . . with common-sense gun safety measures we can reduce gun violence a whole lot more. . . . Number one, anybody in the business of selling firearms must get a license and conduct background checks, or be subject to criminal prosecutions.”
Obama claims that expanding background checks to include any private transfers of guns will reduce mass public shootings. But he offers no evidence. Not one mass public shooting during Obama’s administration would have prevented by these checks. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
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