Bloomberg aired a wildly misleading ad during the Super Bowl attacking the Second Amendment.
Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg aired a $10 million 2020 misleading ad during the Super Bowl. The ad includes a misleading statistic concerning the number of children killed in violent gun-related crimes, and inaccurately suggests an adult victim of a violent crime in Texas was a child, according to Fox News.
In the emotional one-minute spot, Calandrian Simpson Kemp recalls her 20-year-old son, George’s death, an aspiring pro football player, who was gunned down outside Houston in September 2013.: “On a Friday morning, George was shot. George didn’t survive. I just kept saying, ‘You cannot tell me that the child that I gave birth to, is no longer here.’ Lives are being lost every day. It is a national crisis.”
An incorrect statistic immediately flashes on the screen: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.” The number is not attributed to any source.
However, a recent report from the Bloomberg-founded group Everytown for Gun Safety came up with that same number — but only when it included teenagers ages 18 and 19 in the calculation. Bloomberg’s advertisement makes no mention of older teenagers and suggests that the statistic is referring to younger children only. Washington Free Beacon reporter Stephen Gutowski found that once adults were removed from the calculation, the number dropped by nearly half, Fox News writes.
Additionally, court documents from a Texas state appellate court reviewed by Fox News show that the victim referenced in the advertisement, George Kemp, was 20 years old at the time of his death.
“On September 26, 2013, just before midnight, the police received a dispatch for shots fired,” the court wrote in its opinion, which denied an attempt to throw out evidence in the case. “When they arrived, they discovered a deceased male, later identified as George Kemp, age 20, lying face down in a pool of blood.”
The court said the case arose from a “gang-related shooting,” writing that “two groups of young men” had met that night “for a fight,” including a group led by “B. Dilworth, which included … Kemp.”
Those details were not disclosed in Bloomberg’s advertisement.
“It is regrettable but not surprising that salient facts didn’t make the ad,” Amy Hunter, director of media relations at the National Rifle Association (NRA), told Fox News. “Bloomberg cherry-picked aspects of the story to push his agenda. Bloomberg pushes for confiscation of guns and stripping regular Americans of our right to self-defense while he enjoys armed security 24/7. He sees America as his kingdom, and the rest of us as his peasants.”