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Originally posted by TownCryer
Gee, with breitbart and T Cruz as your sources, how could anyone have any problems accepting your premise lock stock and barrel?
“We should be focusing on violent criminals and that has not been the Obama Justice Department's priority. In 2010, there were over 15,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally purchase firearms. Of those 15,000, the Obama Justice Department prosecuted just 44. Let me repeat those numbers because those numbers are staggering, 15,000, they only prosecuted 44.”
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), on the Sean Hannity Show, April 10, 2013
We’ve written before about the disconnect between the number of people denied guns via a background check and the number of people prosecuted. Essentially, bringing a criminal case for lying on a government form is a relatively low priority for prosecutors.
But we have also shown that the federal numbers do not tell the complete picture, because there is strong evidence that state officials use background checks to pick up and charge fugitives and other at-large criminals.
Cruz, in a talking point he also repeated on the Lou Dobbs show, placed the blame for this problem on the Obama administration. He got one set of numbers wrong — in 2010 the number of felons and fugitive denied a firearm was actually 48,000, not 15,000 — but the number of prosecutions he cited (44) was on the nose.
If Cruz wants to attack the fact that relatively few people are prosecuted by federal prosecutors for lying on a background check, he should drop the partisan frame.
This clearly has never been a priority in either Republican or Democratic administrations. So Cruz’s claim that Obama has not made this a priority lacks the proper context and, under our Pinocchio scale, represents “selective telling of the truth.”
Originally posted by CT_Flyboy
Maybe the OP is unaware BUT the Obama administration has never and will never prosecute ANYONE for ANYTHING. It is not a function of the executive branch of government to prosecute criminals.