“The View” host Sunny Hostin claimed on Wednesday that stricter gun control laws lead to fewer gun murders.
WATCH:
The hosts started off the conversation by talking about last Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and Hostin claimed the Florida state assembly’s decision not to ban assault weapons yesterday was a “missed opportunity.”
“I think it was a huge missed opportunity because if you look at what happened after the Sandy Hook shooting with all the first graders murdered, we couldn’t get federal legislation passed,” Hostin said. “However, Connecticut did I think a terrific job of firming up their gun control laws. They really did. And they did it on the state level as opposed to federal level.”
Then, she falsely claimed that gun control helps to prevent gun deaths.
“Just this morning, the governor of Connecticut was saying since 2012 the death rate of murders by gun violence has dropped precipitously. A huge drop,” she argued. “We know that it works and we know where there are stricter gun laws less violent deaths due to guns. This was a missed opportunity.”
However, when ranking states by number of violent gun deaths — excluding suicides — five of the top ten states with the lowest gun-death rates are also states with the least-restrictive gun laws.
Maryland and Illinois, states with strict gun laws, meanwhile sit at 45th and 38th, respectively.
Plus, there has been no way to measure if gun laws are the cause of a change in gun deaths, or if there are other applicable factors that vary by state.
“One would need to specifically determine whether certain laws had an effect, over time, on the gun-death rate in a state,” The Washington Post explained.