Tuesday night’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC took Hillary Clinton to task for her claims about out-of-state guns being brought into New York to commit crimes. In a pretty obvious swing at her competitor Bernie Sanders on Monday, she made the claim that Vermont contributed to the most gun violence in New York. O’Donnell fact-checked Clinton on this, saying her campaign invented an “obscure and useless fact."
Bringing up Clinton’s statements Monday to a New York crowd that gun violence could be blamed on out-of-state guns, primarily Vermont, O’Donnell pointed out that this simply wasn’t true:
O’DONNELL: In 2014, there were 7,686 guns used in crimes in New York. 4,585 of those guns were traced by the ATF. 55 came from Vermont. 55. And there is no indication that any of those guns from Vermont were actually fired. The data doesn't include that kind of information. The number one state, besides New York for firearms recovered in New York, is Virginia, with 395 guns found in 2014.
Instead, O’Donnell noted, California as the biggest state, was found to have the largest number of guns (unsurprisingly.) He then snarked, “We'll see what Hillary Clinton says when she gets to the California campaign about if we could just stop evil California from sending all those guns out into America.”
While O’Donnell and The Washington Post rated Clinton’s claim as false, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean actually defended Clinton’s comments, throwing his own state under the bus.
