NRA Cries Foul on Fact-Checker, Doubles Down on Clinton Confiscation Rhetoric

The National Rifle Association justifies its recent advertisement summarizing a response given by Hillary Clinton at a New Hampshire town hall meeting last year as supporting gun confiscation in America.

On Monday, Politifact rated the ad “mostly false” because the NRA “ignores critical facts that would give a different impression” about Clinton’s answer to a question regarding Australia’s gun buyback program in the 1990s.

The NRA supports its claim by saying it pulled Clinton’s most direct answer to the question: “I think it would be worth considering doing it on a national level, if that can be arranged.”

The fact checker deconstructed the advertisement and then transcribed the bulk of Clinton’s answer. She described several nations passing tighter gun laws after experiencing mass shootings and then used Australia as an example.

In the Australian example, as I recall, that was a buyback program. The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns and then they basically clamped down going forward in terms of, you know, more of a background check, more of a permitting approach.

But they believed, and I think the evidence supports them, that by offering to buy back those guns they were able to, you know, curtail the supply and set a different standard for gun purchases in the future.

Now (U.S.) communities have done that; communities have done gun buyback programs. But I think it would be worth considering doing that on the national level if that could be arranged.

Remember, I know, after the terrible ’08 financial crisis one of the programs President Obama was able to get in place was ‘Cash for Clunkers,’ remember that? You know, getting them off the road and it was partly a way to get people to buy new cars because we wanted more economic activity and it was partly a way to get old models that were polluting too much, sort of, off the road.

So I think that’s worth considering. I don’t know enough details to tell you how we would do it or what would work, but certainly the Australian example is worth looking at.

Politifact says it asked the NRA if it had any other evidence that it believes shows Clinton is open to gun confiscation to which the NRA asked whether that was “relevant” to the fact-check and didn’t provide an answer. However, the NRA says it was only referring to the comment at the meeting, so “to bring in other instances is irrelevant to this fact-check.”

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