Mini Mike may not be ready for primetime yet because a fact check website destroyed his Super Bowl ad.
FactCheck.org broke down Democrat presidential primary candidate Michael Bloomberg’s Super Bowl gun control ad and found that it was as fake as CNN.
The ad was about the 2013 shooting death of 20-year-old George Kemp. Bloomberg tried to use Kemp’s death to reenforce calls for more gun control. The major problem with Bloomberg’s ad is that it leaves out the fact that Kemp was shot after he pulled into the neighborhood challenging someone to a fight.Â
According to the Houston Chronicle witnesses riding with Kemp in his car told police they went to the Lakemont subdivision to confront a man named Brandon Lacour. Kemp, 20, parked down the street from Lacour’s home and called his on his cellphone challenging Lacour 17, to a fight. Lacour show up in a vehicle with other passengers one was carrying a gun, Lacour told the person carrying the gun to shoot Kemp and he did.
The ad featured Kemp’s mother talking about her son who was shot and killed.
factcheck.org reports:
As Kemp calls it a “national crisis” that “lives are being lost every day” to guns, a graphic on screen says, “2,900 children die from gun violence every year.” She later asserts that the gun lobby should fear Bloomberg because “Mike’s fighting for every child.”
Bloomberg’s campaign told us the statistic comes from the former New York mayor’s own nonprofit that advocates stricter gun laws, Everytown for Gun Safety. But that organization used different language in a June 2019 fact sheet.
“Annually, nearly 2,900 children and teens (ages 0 to 19) are shot and killed, and nearly 15,600 are shot and injured,” the document said. (The emphasis is ours.)
That doesn’t include Kemp’s son, who was 20 at the time of his death nearly seven years ago. But it does include many 18- and 19-year-olds who also were legally considered adults in most U.S. states — not “children,” as the ad claims.
The website also sifted through the data and found that when you limit the stat to young people between the ages of 0 to 17 the number of firearm-related deaths drop almost in half to 1,499 a year, 792 were homicides, and 590 of them were suicides.
We aren’t trying to minimize the deaths of young people as an opportunity to slam a Democrat primary candidate. What we are saying is that Michael Bloomberg is manipulating the death of a young man and distorting facts to pass laws that violate our constitutional rights. There’s a lot more to this story than what “Mini Mike” would like you to believe.Â
