Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Are the 'overwhelming majority of violent criminals' Democrats? Ted Cruz said so

During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said most violent criminals are Democrats.
It came after Hewitt brought up the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic that left three dead and nine injured in Colorado Springs, Colo., over Thanksgiving weekend. Hewitt told Cruz that he’d been doing anti-abortion events for 25 years and had never met "a single pro-life activist who is in favor of violence of any sort."
Cruz agreed. "And I would note that this whole episode has really displayed the ugly underbelly of the media," Cruz said. "You know, every time you have some sort of violent crime or mass killing, you can almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the murderer happens to be a Republican, so they can use it to try to paint their political enemies. Now listen, here’s the simple and undeniable fact. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn’t report that."
We received dozens of emails from readers asking us to check the claim, so we took a closer look.

We queried the Cruz campaign, but didn’t hear back. CNN reported that Cruz’s campaign, when asked, cited research by two academics, Marc Meredith, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Morse, then of Stanford University. They published a paper in the January 2014 edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science titled, "Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout?"

No comments:

Post a Comment