Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert was swiftly fact-checked after she used a recent mass shooting in Denmark to criticize existing gun laws in the United States.
Writing on Twitter, Boebert claimed that a mass shooting that took three lives in Copenhagen, the country's capital, is proof that "gun laws DO NOT stop mass shootings" because Denmark has "some of the strictest gun laws in Europe."
Boebert's claim was soon noticed by human rights attorney Qasim Rashid, who pointed out that the mass shooting in Copenhagen was Denmark's "first mass shooting since 1994."
By contrast, he said, a mass shooting that occurred in Highland Park, Illinois on July 4, the day after Boebert wrote her tweet, was the first mass shooting in the United States since one that occurred in Richmond, Virginia earlier that same morning.
In April 1994, a 35-year-old man shot four people, all of them female students, two of them fatally, at Aarhus University in Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark. It is the only school shooting to happen in the country's history.
Three separate shootings took place in Copenhagen over the course of a single day in February 2015, all committed by the same perpetrator. In total, two victims and the perpetrator were killed, while five police officers were wounded.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 18 mass shootings in the United States since July 1.
Boebert was rightfully called out online for her false equivalency.
Boebert has long opposed comprehensive gun control measures to limit mass shootings.
She was criticized in May after she attempted to use the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to argue against gun control in the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Boebert, speaking after a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers, said gun control won't limit mass shootings because “when 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes.”
Boebert insisted she wants "our schools secured," to see "our children protected," and for there to be "teachers that can protect themselves and their students," adding all of this can be achieved "without trying to disarm law-abiding citizens.”
Last year, after Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie was criticized for tweeting a family photo in which he and six family members each brandished a military-style weapon in front of a Christmas tree, Boebert responded to Massie's photo with a picture of her four equally armed children.
"The Boeberts have your six," Boebert tweeted to Massie, using a military saying that means, "I've got your back" even though neither politician has military experience.
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