The United States continues to mourn in the wake of two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio that occurred 13 hours apart and resulted in a total of 31 deaths.
The shooter responsible for the 22 of those deaths at a shopping center in El Paso published a manifesto minutes before the shooting, featuring anti-immigrant sentiments similar to those of President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Perhaps in an attempt to deflect that criticism, the president's advisor and eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, used the shootings to remind people of violence in inner cities.
Ivanka's tweet is misleading and at least partly false. This weekend was not the deadliest in Chicago this year, nor did anyone die in the shooting she references. Seven were wounded and the shooting occurred around 1:20 am, when no children were present.
The tweet also implies that the deaths took place in one incident, when in fact, none of the 29 shooting incidents in Chicago over the weekend included more than one fatality.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot soon responded:
“That’s the danger of somebody with a platform and audience … that doesn’t know what they’re talking about and getting the fundamental facts wrong that they can easily figure out if they had the decency to actually reach out to us if they wanted to be a constructive and engaged partner.”
“What I’m focused on is actually helping run the city of Chicago and working hard every day with the superintendent and his leadership team to keep people in our city safe,” Lightfoot continued. “I’m not going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Twitter roundly criticized Ivanka for her tone-deaf tweets.
What's more, doesn't Chicago's violence bolster the argument for common sense gun laws?
Yikes.
