Joe Biden claimed in tonight’s debate that guns have killed 150 million people in the United States since 2007. That’s roughly half the U.S. population. Neither the moderators nor his competitors corrected his ludicrous error.
Why? Well, because disinformation and factual errors are par for the course in the Democrats’ anti-gun narrative.
Biden claims firearms have killed more than half of the U.S. population since 2007 pic.twitter.com/a679hcVbYg
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 26, 2020
Of course, Biden may not have meant to spread misinformation to millions of debate viewers. Maybe he meant 150,000, and it was just a slip-up, as the mentally declining, aging candidate is increasingly prone to do. But we must realize that Democrats regularly push such disinformation on gun control.
Democrats regularly exaggerate the number of mass shootings in this country. Liberal media outlets and Democratic politicians falsely claimed that there were “11 shootings in the first 23 days of 2018” — a lie. As Becket Adams explained, this includes “at least two suicides, a 32-year-old man shooting at a school bus with a pellet gun, and a student accidentally firing a real gun in class after mistaking it for a training weapon … not the sort of thing one imagines when he reads the words ‘school shooting’ in a headline.”
Democrats also regularly mislead the public when they cite the number of “gun deaths.” They use inflated figures that count suicides, despite the fact that the debate over gun control is really about homicides and murders. They do this with the explicit and dishonest goal of painting a far more drastic picture and fearmongering in support of their policies.
So, too, Democrats regularly push a fact-free narrative about large portions of gun sales escaping the currently existing background check system. In fact, roughly 90% of gun sales already must go through a background check, and no one has ever credibly shown that the 10%, private, intrastate sales in certain states, are a problem. It’s already required under federal law that all federally licensed gun stores run customers through a background check.
But these facts are inconvenient for the gun control narrative, so Democrats regularly twist and ignore them.
Anti-gun activists also routinely use imaginary or misleading language in the gun debate. As Adams notes, there is no such thing as “rapid-fire magazines” or “gas-assisted receiver firearms,” and it is not, in fact, easier to buy an AK-47 than it is to buy cough medicine.
All of this is to say, Biden’s debate stage error about half the U.S. population dying from guns isn’t just one gaffe in a vacuum — it’s standard Democratic fare when talking about guns.
