News Reporter: Fact Checker: Was the Las Vegas shooter ‘only stopped’ because he lacked a ‘silencer’? Not exactly.

Friday, 6 October 2017

Fact Checker: Was the Las Vegas shooter ‘only stopped’ because he lacked a ‘silencer’? Not exactly.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Was the Las Vegas shooter 'only stopped' because he lacked a 'silencer'? Not exactly.

In the wake of the mass shooting that left 58 dead and hundreds wounded in Las Vegas, Democrats have drawn attention to a GOP-backed bill that would streamline the purchase of suppressors — more popularly known as silencers — for firearms.

Firearms, even with suppressors, generally are very loud. A suppressor generally will reduce the sound of a weapon by an average 3o decibels, about the level of ear protection. A 30-decibel reduction means an AR-15 rifle would have a noise equivalent of 132 decibels. That is considered equivalent to the noise level of a jackhammer. (We previously gave Three Pinocchios to a claim that silencers make guns “quiet.”)

Former Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said this week that the gunman was “only stopped finally because he did not have a silencer on his weapon. And the sound drew people to the place where he was ultimately stopped. Can you imagine what this would have been if he had silencers on these weapons?"

Audio of police communications on that night did show officers were guided by the sound of automatic fire coming from the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay, and that the gunshots helped officers track down the shooter. But a guest two floors below also reported the sounds of weapons fire. And given that AR-15 rifles are still very loud even with a suppressor, a hotel filled with guests almost certainly would have heard and reported 132 decibels.

Kaine’s staff explained that he meant that silencers muffle a gunshot’s source, and make it more difficult to locate a shooter. Still, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the gunman was “only stopped” because he didn’t have a silencer. We awarded Two Pinocchios.

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Bernie Sanders’s misleading claim about global wealth inequality

Economic inequality in the United States was a central issue during Sen. Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign. And now, he’s going global with this talking point. At a recent event, Sanders claimed that the “six wealthiest people in the world having as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population, 3.7 billion people.”

But wealth is a fundamentally misleading measure if you're comparing countries across the globe. It's one thing to look at inequality inside a country, but international comparisons are in another realm and fraught with even more problems.

The study Sanders relied on did not consider how debt is measured and held, what kinds of assets each percentile group owns, or how the currencies across countries are converted. So it's hard to make heads or tails of what “wealth” actually means, with respect to people's daily lives around the globe.

Moreover, negative wealth — which includes people with high standards of living — really drags down the bottom 50 percent. Sanders's statistic, while provocative, is basically meaningless. He earns Three Pinocchios.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

–Michelle Ye Hee Lee