Senator Sanders talks often and correctly about the low gun violence in Vermont.
On April 11, Clinton used a more refined version publicly — eliciting gasps from the audience. But this time, the words “per capita” appeared, signaling the campaign believed it had found the right data to support her argument.
So this is the anatomy of a talking point.
Clinton has been using gun control to cast a significant difference between herself and Bernie Sanders, repeatedly pointing out pro-gun votes that Sanders cast in Congress. (See The Fact Checker roundup of everything you need to know about Sanders’s record on guns.) Now, Clinton is drawing attention to the flow of guns into New York from Vermont. What are the underlying facts?
The Facts
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) tracks the movement of guns tied to crime through a process called “tracing.” ATF tracks the point where the gun was manufactured or imported, to the point of its first retail purchaser.
Tracing allows law enforcement to see how far a gun was transported from its point of first retail sale. They can use tracing data to find licensed and unlicensed sellers who may be trafficking guns, and to find potential suspects and witnesses in criminal investigations. Tracing can indicate how serious the illegal gun problem is in a community, the ATF says.
Clinton’s campaign pointed to a New York Times analysis of nine years of gun tracing data. New York and New Jersey have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but more than two-third of crime guns had come from out of state.
Law enforcement agencies tie the movement of guns into New York and New Jersey to the “Iron Pipeline,” which is Interstate 95 and connector highways. The idea is that guns are being trafficked from southern states with less restrictive gun laws, generally via cars, and then are used in crime in northern states that have stricter gun laws. (Related: We have fact-checked whether states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest deaths, which found that despite Vermont’s relatively lax gun laws, it had the second lowest death rate from guns when suicides are excluded.)
There were 7,686 guns recovered and traced in New York in 2014, ATF data show. The source state was identified in 4,585 of the traces, and 30 percent (1,397) were from within the state.
In 2013 and 2014, the states where the most number of out-of-state crime guns originated were Virginia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia. The state with the most number of guns per 100,000 people was, indeed, Vermont.
But 1 percent of crime guns whose sources were identified in 2014 originated from Vermont: 55 of 4,585.
Crime guns in New York from Vermont is a recent trend. From 2006 to 2012, Vermont was not listed as a top 15 state for crime guns in New York from Vermont, ATF data show.
The top 15 source states for firearms found in New York, by raw numbers and per capita for 2014 and 2013:
Source state |
Number of guns (2013) |
per 100,000 (2013) |
Number of guns (2014) |
per 100,000 (2014) |
New York |
1499 |
7.61 |
1397 |
7.07 |
Virginia |
423 |
5.11 |
395 |
4.74 |
Pennsylvania |
342 |
2.68 |
371 |
2.90 |
Florida |
337 |
1.72 |
292 |
1.47 |
Georgia |
331 |
3.31 |
386 |
3.82 |
North Carolina |
327 |
3.32 |
279 |
2.81 |
South Carolina |
294 |
6.16 |
256 |
5.30 |
Ohio |
161 |
1.39 |
152 |
1.31 |
Alabama |
117 |
2.42 |
91 |
1.88 |
Texas |
106 |
0.40 |
103 |
0.38 |
West Virginia |
65 |
3.51 |
66 |
3.57 |
California |
62 |
0.16 |
49 |
0.13 |
Vermont |
61 |
9.73 |
55 |
8.78 |
Tennessee |
57 |
0.88 |
57 |
0.87 |
Connecticut |
48 |
1.33 |
59 |
1.64 |
The Clinton campaign said that controlling for population is a “critically important number, as it shows just how dangerous Vermont’s laws are relative to other states. If Vermont had the population of California, it would source roughly 3,800 crime guns each year to New York — far more than the top 15 total source states for New York crime guns combined.”
Clinton’s answer was in response to Sanders’s claim about Vermont being a small, rural state with no gun laws, the campaign said. The campaign said it chose to look at the per capita rate because it shows that despite the small population in Vermont, the pro-gun laws and the state’s background check system are “so bad that more guns per people living there are ending up in crime scenes in New York.”
Bernie was complicit in supporting and supporting these laws and he just needs to own it and apologize.