Fox's Bolling Misrepresents President Obama To Falsely Claim “Terror Outweighs The [Threat Of] Mass Shooting”

Bolling: “Does Politicizing Mean Lie About It? Because That's Exactly What President Obama Did”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

On October 1, in response to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon that left 10 people dead (including the gunman) and another seven injured, President Obama called on news agencies to begin informing the public about the scope of gun violence in the United States by comparing the number of Americans killed every year by guns against the number of Americans killed by acts of terrorism. With the notable exception of 2001, when the largest terror attack in history occurred on American soil, American citizens are roughly 1,000 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than they are to be killed in an act of terror. As President Obama noted, the United States devotes “entire [government] agencies” to preventing terrorism but “we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths.” On the October 2 edition of Fox News' The Five, co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Eric Bolling attacked the president for “politicizing” gun violence tragedies in the United States with Bolling falsely claiming that Obama “lied about” the threat of mass shootings:

ERIC BOLLING: Does politicizing mean lie about it? Because that's exactly what President Obama did right there. He just said “We need to compare terror, versus gun violence.” That's not what this is about. This is -- You want to do a comparison, President Obama, do terror against mass shootings. If you do the number of people killed in terror attacks, we know 3,000 happened in one day. And a mass shooting is what, five to seven, ballpark or so? And it happens what, every couple of weeks or so? There's no question the terror outweighs the mass shooting. So, it's unfair to say all gun violence. I mean, you want to point at gun violence, that's -- you can you compare gun violence to mass shootings, and say the gun violence includes cities like Chicago. Or cities like Baltimore where there are elevated number of murders and deaths at the other end of a gun, versus other cities. And find out what the reason that is the case. (Emphasis Added)

Related:

American Deaths In Terrorism vs. Gun Violence In One Graph

So Far In 2015, We've Had 274 Days And 294 Mass Shootings

Previously:

Fox's Bolling Botches Gun “Facts” By Erroneously Linking Mass Murders To Gun-Free Zones

Fox's Bolling Dismisses Fact That Children Are Killed In Gun-Owning Households As “Very Anecdotal”

Fox's Bolling: When We Waved Guns Around On The Show, “We Were Just Talking Second Amendment Rights”