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WASHINGTON-
Speakers at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting attacked a Chicago gun ban that doesn’t exist, ignored safety improvements at the Texas school where children were butchered, and skewed national gun and crime statistics as they opposed any tightening of gun laws resisted.
A look at some of the claims:
TEXAS SEN. TED CRUZ: “Gun bans don’t work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole it’s been for far too long.”
THE FACTS: Chicago hasn’t had a handgun ban in over a decade. And in 2014, a federal judge overturned the city’s ban on gun sales. Big supporters of the NRA, like Cruz, may know this, since it was the NRA that sued Chicago over its old handgun ban and heard the case in the US Supreme Court, which ruled the 2010 ban unconstitutional.
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FORMER US PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Classroom doors should be hardened so that they are lockable from the inside and locked from the outside against intruders.”
THE FACTS: As reasonable as that sounds, it could backfire in a terrible way, experts warn.
A lock on the classroom door is one of the most basic and recommended security measures in school. But in Uvalde it kept the victims inside and the police out.
Nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway outside the classroom school for more than 45 minutes before agents used a master key to open the classroom’s locked door.
And Trump’s proposal fails to 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 gun ownership rate has not changed.”
THE FACTS: This is misleading. The percentage of US households with at least one gun in the household has not changed significantly over the past 50 years. But the number of assault rifles used in the Uvalde school shooting and dozens of other school shootings has skyrocketed since lawmakers expired a 1994 ban on such weapons in 2004.
In the years before and after this ban, an estimated 8.5 million AR-platform rifles were in circulation in the United States. Since the ban was lifted, the guns – dubbed “modern sporting guns” by the industry – have grown in popularity. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that nearly 20 million copies were in circulation in 2020.
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CRUZ: “Had Uvalde received a grant to improve school security, they might have made changes that would have stopped the shooter and killed him there on the ground before he could hurt any of those innocent kids and teachers.”
THE FACTS: This claim overlooks the fact that Uvalde has doubled its school safety budget and spent years improving protection for school children. None of this stopped the gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers.
Annual district budgets show the school system has increased from $204,000 in 2017 to $435,000 this year. The district had already developed a safety plan in 2019 that envisaged staffing the schools with four officers and four advisors. It had installed a fence and invested in a program that monitors social media for threats and bought software to screen school attendees.
The grant, which Cruz claims would have saved lives, came from a failed 2013 bill designed to help schools hire more armed officers and install bulletproof doors. Uvalde’s school had an officer, but the person was not on campus when the gunman entered the building. And Cruz’s demand for bulletproof doors might not have worked in this case, since police were unable to break through the locked classroom door where the gunman murdered children and teachers.
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AP EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a look at the veracity of politicians’ claims.
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