Last Friday Obama spoke to students at Benedict College and was asked about gun violence. Of course, Obama blamed it on the Second Amendment, saying we have the highest homicide rate in the industrial world by a mile, and also suggested that we don’t have background checks:
Obama also claimed that guns are as easy to purchase as a book or a fresh vegetable:
The folks at Powerline explains the lies here:
There are two things wrong with Obama’s claims. First, the homicide rate in the United States is relatively low, and falling. The World Bank has compiled homicide rates by country; most are higher than ours, some many times higher. To be sure, some “industrialized” countries have lower rates than we do. Norway, for example, has a murder rate that is only a fraction of ours. But the reasons are entirely demographic: I would wager that the homicide rate among Norwegian-Americans is even lower than Norway’s.
Breitbart adds this:
However, the gun control lobby’s relentless claim that America’s homicide rate is so much higher than other industrialized countries breaks down under scrutiny.
For example, in August 2013, Breitbart News reported on a study in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy which showed that the murder rate in heavily gun-controlled Russia was approximately 20.52 per 100,000 people in 2002. A high point for America was 6.6 per 100,000 people in 1993, and that rate fell to 3.2 per 100,000 by 2011, after the number of privately owned guns in America went from 192 million in 1994 to 310 million in 2009.
So, 20.52 per 100,000 people are murdered in Russia versus America’s 6.6 per 100,000–later to be 3.2 per 100,000–yet, according to President Obama, America’s murder rate is, “like a mile” higher than that of other industrialized countries.
Powerline also hits the lie about the homicide being the fault of easy to buy handguns:
Obama is also wrong in asserting that America’s homicide rate is attributable to the “ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.” In fact, our homicide rate is only half what it was during the Clinton administration, even though handgun ownership has exploded over that time period. More guns have been associated with less homicide, and less crime generally. Further, international experience shows that there is zero correlation between gun laws and homicide rates. To take one obvious example, Venezuela’s socialist government has banned the private ownership of firearms and ammunition. Nevertheless, according to the World Bank data, Venezuela’s homicide rate is more than ten times that of the United States.
I’d also like to remind you that when Obama claims we don’t have background checks, he’s referring to private gun transfers, the ones between you and your family members or between you and your friends. He wants background checks on all of those as well. There are already background checks in any legal store that sells guns, but that’s not good enough for the left.