Joe Biden falsely claims '150 million people' in the US have been killed by guns since 2007

During Tuesday's Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina, former vice president Joe Biden made a wildly untrue statement about how many people had been killed by guns in the US since 2007.

In an exchange with Bernie Sanders on the senator's voting record to make gun manufacturers not responsible for gun violence Biden mistakenly said that '150 million' people had died as a result of guns in the last 13 years.

The 77-year-old said:

I got assault weapons banned. I got magazines that could not hold more than 19 rounds in them. I got them eliminated. Except we had a thing called an election with hanging chads in Florida and it was not reauthorised.

Imagine if I stood here and said we give immunity to drug companies, we give immunity to tobacco companies. That has caused carnage on our streets.

150 million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability. More than all the wars including Vietnam from that point on.

This was after Sanders had defended his record against the National Rifle Association.

I have a D-minus voting record from the NRA. Thirty years ago, I lost a race for the one seat in Congress in Vermont because 30 years ago I supported a ban on assault weapons.

Right now, my view is we need to expand background checks, end the gun show loophole and do what the American people want, not what the NRA wants.

Needless to say, Biden stats on the amounts of deaths at the hands of gun violence is completely wrong.

According to Daniel Dale of CNN Biden's campaigns team said that the candidate misspoke and was supposed to say '150,000 people' and also got the date wrong.

If Biden was right then approximately one third of the US population would have died from gun violence. Figures show that the number of deaths is actually 373,663, which is still a worrying figure but still falls considerably short of the amount voiced by Biden.

To be fair, Biden's statement that more people had died via firearms than those that died in every war since Vietnam is actually correct. The National Archives show that 58,220 soldiers died in the Vietnam conflict, with roughly over 7,000 dying during conflicts in the Middle East results in just over 65,000 deaths.

Fox News did report that Biden's statement might have been more factually correct if he had said 'aggravated assaults with a firearm' rather than 'deaths', as between 2008 and 2017 there were 1.5 million incidents of that kind involving a gun.

HT Newsweek

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