Bloomberg’s $10M Super Bowl ad posts misleading stat on child gun deaths

Cue the meme generator

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s $10 million 2020 Super Bowl ad includes a misleading statistic concerning the number of children killed in violent gun-related crimes, and inaccurately suggests that an adult victim of gun crime in Texas was a child, Fox News has found.

In the raw and emotional one-minute spot, Calandrian Simpson Kemp recalls her son’s death: “On a Friday morning, George was shot. George didn’t survive. I just kept saying, ‘You cannot tell me that the child that I gave birth to, is no longer here.’ Lives are being lost every day. It is a national crisis.”

A statistic immediately appears on the screen: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.” The number is not attributed to any source.

However, a recent report from the Bloomberg-founded group Everytown for Gun Safety came up with that same number — but only when it included teenagers ages 18 and 19 in the calculation. Bloomberg’s advertisement makes no mention of older teenagers and suggests that the statistic is referring to younger children only. Washington Free Beacon reporter Stephen Gutowski found that once adults were removed from the calculation, the number dropped by nearly half.

Additionally, court documents from a Texas state appellate court reviewed by Fox News show that the victim referenced in the advertisement, George Kemp, was 20 years old at the time of his death.