WASHINGTON –
Speakers at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association attacked a gun ban in Chicago that does not exist, ignored security improvements at the Texas school where children were sacrificed, and bluntly distorted statistics. arms and crime nationals while repressing any tightening of gun laws.
Take a look at some of the statements:
TEXAS WITHOUT. TED CRUZ: “Gun bans don’t work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the hell of the murder it’s been for too long.”
THE FACTS: Chicago has not banned guns for more than a decade. And in 2014, a federal judge overturned a city ban on gun shops. Major NRA supporters, such as Cruz, are well aware of this, as it was the NRA who sued Chicago over its former handgun ban and argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the ban unconstitutional in 2010.
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FORMER AMERICAN PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Classroom doors need to be hardened so that they can be locked from the inside and closed to intruders from the outside.”
THE FACTS: No matter how much common sense it may seem, it could be counterproductive in a horrible way, experts warn.
A lock on the classroom door is one of the most basic and recommended school safety measures. But in Uvalde, he kept the victims inside and the police outside.
Nearly 20 officers stayed in a hallway outside the school for more than 45 minutes before officers used a master key to open the closed classroom door.
And Trump’s proposal does not take into account what would happen if class members were trapped behind a locked door and one of the students was the aggressor in future attacks.
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CRUZ: “The rate of possession of weapons has not changed.”
THE FACTS: This is misleading. The percentage of American households with at least one gun in the home has not changed significantly over the past 50 years. But the number of assault rifles, such as the one used in the Uvalde school shooting and dozens of other school shootings, has skyrocketed since lawmakers dropped the 1994 ban on these weapons. in 2004.
In the years before and after the ban, an estimated 8.5 million AR-platform rifles were in circulation in the United States. Since the ban was lifted, rifles, called “modern sport rifles” by the industry, have grown in popularity. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated that there were about 20 million in circulation by 2020.
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CRUZ: “If Uvalde had gotten a grant to improve school safety, they could have made changes that would have stopped the shooter and killed him on the ground, before hurting any of these innocent children and teachers.”
THE FACTS: This statement overlooks the fact that Uvalde had doubled his school safety budget and spent years improving protections for schoolchildren. None of this stopped the gunman who killed 19 students and two teachers.
The district’s annual budgets show that the school system went from spending $ 204,000 in 2017 to $ 435,000 this year. The district had developed a safety plan in 2019 that included staffing schools with four officers and four councilors. He had installed a fence and invested in a program that monitors social media to detect threats and bought software to filter visitors to the school.
The grant Cruz claims to have saved lives comes from a failed 2013 bill that planned to help schools hire more gunmen and install bulletproof gates. Uvalde’s school did have an officer, but the person was not on campus at the time the shooter entered the building. And, Cruz’s call for bulletproof gates may not have worked in this case, as police were unable to break down the closed classroom door where the shooter murdered children and teachers.
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AP EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a look at the veracity of the claims of political figures.