WASHINGTON ( Associated Press) – Speakers at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association criticized a Chicago gun ban that doesn’t exist, ignored safety upgrades at a Texas school where children were executed and national gun and crime. The figures were chubby as they pushed back against any tightening. of gun laws.
Take a look at some of the claims:
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz: “The gun ban doesn’t work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the hell of murder that it has been in for a very long time. ,
Fact: Handguns haven’t been banned in Chicago for over a decade. And in 2014, a federal judge overturned the city’s ban on gun stores. Big supporters of the NRA, such as Cruz, know this all too well, noting that it was the NRA that sued Chicago over its old handgun ban and filed suit before the US Supreme Court, which in 2010 declared the ban unconstitutional. Gave.
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Former President Donald Trump: “Classroom doors should be made stricter to lock from the inside and to close to intruders from the outside.”
Fact: As ludicrous as it may sound, it can backfire in a terrifying way, experts warn.
The lock on the classroom door is one of the most basic and widely recommended school security measures. But in Uvalde, it kept the victims inside and the police out.
About 20 officers stood in a hallway outside the classroom’s school for more than 45 minutes before agents used the master key to open the locked classroom door.
And Trump’s proposal did not take into account what would happen if class members were trapped behind a closed door and one of the students was the attacker in future attacks.
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CRUZ: “The rate of gun ownership hasn’t changed.”
Fact: This is misleading. The percentage of American households with at least one gun has not changed significantly over the past 50 years. But the number of assault-type rifles, such as those used in the Uvalde school shooting and dozens of other school shootings, has skyrocketed since legislators allowed the 1994 ban on such weapons to end in 2004. Is.
In the years before and after that ban, there were an estimated 8.5 million AR-platform rifles in circulation in the United States. Since the ban was lifted, rifles – referred to by the industry as “modern sporting rifles” – have grown in popularity. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated that there were about 20 million in circulation in 2020.
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CRUZ: “If Uvalde had received a grant to upgrade the school’s security, he would have made changes that would have stopped the shooter and killed him right there before he hurt any of these innocent kids and teachers “
Fact: This claim ignores the fact that Uvalde had doubled his school-safety budget and spent years upgrading safety for schoolchildren. None of this stopped the gunman who killed 19 students and two teachers.
The annual district budget shows that the school system went from spending $204,000 in 2017 to $435,000 for this year. The district developed a safety plan in 2019 that involved staffing the schools, along with four officers and four counselors. It had installed a fence and invested in a program that monitors social media for threats and purchased software to screen school visitors.
Cruz claims the life-saving grant was from a failed 2013 bill that planned to help schools hire more armed officers and install bulletproof doors. There was an officer at Uvalde’s school, but the man was not on campus when the shooter entered the building. And, Cruz’s call for bulletproof doors may not have worked in this case, given that police were unable to break down the closed door of the classroom where the shooter killed children and teachers.
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Editor’s note – A look at the veracity of the claims of political figures.
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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings
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