After a shooting this past weekend left 22 people dead and many more injured at an El Paso Walmart, Democratic presidential hopeful and El Paso native, Beto O’Rourke, came home to meet and grieve with the people there. Known for touting the safety of the city, O’Rourke said the El Paso’s average annual murder rate was surpassed in that one day by the shooting.
“They’re asking us to do something about it,” O’Rourke said. “Yes, it’s the gun laws. Yes, it’s the universal background checks. Yes, we should stop selling weapons of war into our communities, but I think we also have to confront this hatred that I have never seen in my lifetime, and we certainly have not seen in El Paso. Some years, in a city of almost 700,000, we had five murders the entire year. Our average over the last 10 years is 18 [murders per year]. We exceeded that average just on one day. This is not normal, it is not acceptable. We cannot just move on from this and the folks I just met with do not want us to move on from this.”
Is that a fact? Madlin Mekelburg of the PolitiFact Texas fact-checking team based at the Austin American-Statesman has the answer.
Hear how O’Rourke’s claim scored in the player above.
Written by Marina Marquez.
