In the aftermath of two deadly mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, U.S. political leaders made a series of statements on gun violence that were unsubstantiated, lacked context or were seemingly contradictory. Here we look at some of those statements and present the facts.
At least 144 people have died in 31 mass killings in the United States since the beginning of the year. Most of them, 141, died of gunshot wounds. The ages of victims ranged from 1 to 83. We mapped the 31 incidents across the U.S.
Several of the factual distortions concerned what the candidates had to say about one another.
The first of the back-to-back Democratic debates in July included spin from the candidates on gun violence, Republican tax cuts, climate change, manufacturing jobs and more.
On the campaign trail, former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump have both claimed that a cure to cancer would soon become a reality — if they were elected in 2020. Experts, however, don’t share that degree of optimism.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned the economics of wind energy, saying that wind “doesn’t work” without subsidies. Experts have differing assessments of that. By some metrics, wind power is already competitive with fossil fuels without subsidies. But other measures don’t come to the same conclusion.
Memes circulating online claim that former President Barack Obama removed the citizenship question from the 2010 census. He didn’t. The citizenship question in 2010 was handled the same way it had been since 1970.
Former Vice President Joe Biden defended his support decades ago for a controversial crime bill, saying, “There’s another part of my long record that’s being grossly misrepresented: the 1994 crime bill.” We’ll go through Biden’s points about what was in the bill and what he supported or opposed.
Statistical measures of how things have changed since the president took office.
In a July 8 speech dedicated to the environment, President Donald Trump made a series of misleading or false statements as he played up the U.S.’s environmental achievements, many of which predate his time as commander-in-chief.