Chris Cuomo busts Ted Cruz for lying about gun control

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz is laughing at efforts to control gun violence. But CNN’s Chris Cuomo had the last laugh when Cruz tried to lie his way through a recent appearance using gun lobby talking points.

During an interview on CNN’s “New Day” Wednesday morning, Cruz dragged out a tired talking point on gun control, telling Cuomo, “You see a lot of Democratic politicians posturing and advocating all sorts of gun control,” and then asserting that “it doesn’t work, it’s singularly ineffective.”

“How do you know it doesn’t work?” Cuomo asked.

“Because if you look at the jurisdictions with the toughest gun control laws,” Cruz replied, “cities like Chicago, cities like Washington, D.C., they almost invariably have the highest crime rates, the highest murder rates…”

No, but that’s not true,” Cuomo interrupted. “The Giffords Center analysis says that, with a few exceptions, states that have the strictest gun control measures have the lowest rates of gun deaths. Look at Connecticut. Look how they brought the numbers down.”

“Except you’re citing sources from a partisan source that is not reliable,” Cruz said.

“Where are you citing them from? The NRA?” Cuomo asked.

With no actual facts to cite, Cruz simply returned to parroting NRA lies.

Cuomo is absolutely right, and Cruz is lying when he says the Giffords Center analysis is somehow tainted by partisanship. The statistics are from the Centers for Disease Control, and a 2013 study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found an even stronger correlation between gun control laws and lower rates of gun death.

Further analysis of the CDC data shows that some states with strong gun control laws are undermined by neighboring states with weak gun regulation, like California, which is surrounded by states with weak gun laws.

Cruz is running for his political life against a Democrat who is surging in a politically shifting Texas. Without the facts on his side, it looks like lying for the NRA is all he has left.