FactChecking Biden’s CNN Town Hall
Former Vice President Joe Biden made a series of false and misleading statements on guns and crime during a CNN town hall in Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 26:
- Biden inflated support among gun owners and National Rifle Association members to ban so-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Biden put the figure at 58%, though polls show support among gun owners below 50% and much less among NRA members.
- He wrongly claimed that Sen. Bernie Sanders, after losing his initial bid for a House seat in 1998, “didn’t talk about the assault weapons ban” when he ran again and won two years later. Sanders expressed support for an assault weapons ban in both campaigns.
- Biden said the 1994 crime bill that he sponsored “did not put more people in jail.” Experts say the bill often gets too much blame for a mass incarceration trend that began two decades prior to the bill passing, but they also say some of the provisions in the bill exacerbated the trend.
- The Democratic presidential candidate misleadingly said the crime bill “had money for state prisons, which I opposed.” In fact, Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill.
- Biden downplayed the impact of the crime bill on incarceration by noting that “92 percent of every single prisoner is behind a bar in a state, a local, or a county prison, not in a federal prison.” But the federal law also affected state and local prisons as well.
- He claimed that his 1994 crime bill “cut the violent crime rate in half.” Government and independent experts say the law had a modest effect, citing other factors such as improved economic conditions and changing demographics.
