Fact check: Democrats distort the record on guns after Nashville shooting
Sarah Westwood
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One week after a shooter opened fire in a Nashville, Tennessee, Christian school and killed six people, including three children, Democrats have continued to press for an assault-style weapons ban they have sought for years.
Democrats accused their Republican counterparts of blocking legislation that would protect children at school from mass shootings, while GOP lawmakers insisted that further limits on gun ownership would not have stopped the Nashville attack or others like it.
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And while Democrats still don’t have the votes yet to advance an assault-style weapons ban, they have relied on occasionally misleading rhetoric to push for one anyway.
Here is a fact check of some of the latest Democratic gun arguments.
“[We’ve had] more school shootings than days in the year so far in 2023.” — Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), CBS’s Face the Nation, April 2
This is a misleading claim from Murphy.
The Connecticut Democrat has long served as a voice for gun control advocacy due to the painful history of his home state, where a school shooter claimed the lives of more than two dozen people, most of them children under 7 years old, in 2012. Murphy was the congressman representing the district of the school at the time.
He appeared to cite statistics from the K-12 School Shooting Database, a data resource compiled by the Violence Project.
That database claims 95 shooting incidents have taken place at schools so far in the 93 days of this year.
But the claim is misleading because of just how broadly the group defines a shooting incident. The total includes any incident “when a gun is fired, brandished (pointed at a person with intent), or bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason,” according to the Violence Project.
That means, for example, that a gang-related shooting near a school during which a bullet strikes a sidewalk on a weekend, with no students present, would still count toward the total number of school shootings for the year.
Most people would provide a very different definition of a school shooting, and the type of shooting that occurred in Nashville is much rarer. According to the same dataset, only 105 school shooting incidents since the 1970s have involved “indiscriminate shooting.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recycled a well-worn talking point that Democrats have brandished since 2020, when statistics made it technically possible for them to make this claim.
However, the assertion is somewhat misleading.
Firearms slightly edged out motor vehicle accidents in 2020 to become the leading cause of death for children — but only if one includes juveniles up to and including 19 years of age in the calculations.
When analyses exclude 18- and 19-year-olds from the statistics, motor vehicle accidents remain the leading cause of death for children.
The United States also has a significantly higher teenage suicide rate than other countries, the Kaiser Family Foundation notes, and suicides account for a major portion of youth deaths attributed to firearms.
An uptick in street violence involving juveniles over the past three years has also likely contributed to the increase in gun casualties among young people.
Using those statistics in the context of a conversation about school shootings is misleading because it conflates suicides, gang violence, firearm accidents, and other types of shootings with the attacks on schools that most people would associate with the idea of school shootings.
Republicans did indeed postpone the House Judiciary Committee event that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) referenced last week, although the resolution in question would not accomplish what the Democrat claimed.
The committee had been slated to mark up a resolution that would rescind a rule from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that has not yet taken effect.
Stabilizing braces were inspired by disabled veterans who struggled to fire larger pistols steadily; in 2012, the ATF approved the design of the firearm add-on and specifically noted at the time that the braces did not convert pistols to a different class of weapon.
But the Biden administration’s ATF recently made a rule that would reclassify any pistol with such a brace as a short-barreled rifle, which would trigger requirements for gun owners to register their firearm with the government or face criminal penalties.
“You had an agency tell Americans the rule was one thing,” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Hill. “Ten years later, they just changed the rule without going through Congress.”
Swalwell’s claim that Republicans wanted to help mass shooters get stabilizing braces is misleading at best. Those devices simply help shooters get a better grip on pistols with larger frames, and the GOP’s focus on the rule was mostly over procedural concerns related to ATF overreach.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is certainly not alone in characterizing the widely used and ill-defined category of assault-style weapons as a leading threat to the public.
Assault-style weapons, by which many Democrats mean AR-15s, were not necessarily developed exclusively for combat and are not primarily the weapons of choice for killers.
The original manufacturer of the AR-15 designed it specifically for civilians and law enforcement officers, not for soldiers. It was originally designed as a civilian version of the M-16, which was a combat weapon.
The AR-15 is the most popular rifle on the market, with millions in circulation across the U.S. Its sinister look has made it a target of gun control advocates; several high-profile mass shooters, including the one in a Uvalde, Texas, school shooting last year, have also used it to carry out massacres.
But such rifles are ultimately used in just a fraction of crimes. A National Institutes of Health study found that “most estimates” of the types of guns used in crimes found that under 10% of criminals used assault weapons.
“You’re not allowed to own a flamethrower. You’re not allowed to own so many other things. Why in God’s name do we allow these weapons of war in our streets and at our schools?” — President Joe Biden, remarks in North Carolina, March 28
Biden compared owning an assault weapon to owning a litany of things he tried to portray as equally deadly and illegal, such as a machine gun.
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But owning a flamethrower is, in fact, legal in almost every state. Flamethrowers are not regulated like guns and therefore have none of the background check and permitting requirements that gun purchases do.
And machine guns aren’t completely outlawed, either; automatic weapons manufactured and properly registered before 1986 can still be bought and sold, and hundreds of thousands of them remain in circulation today.