AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
- Ivanka Trump’s efforts to spotlight gun violence in Chicago spectacularly backfired when the city’s mayor slammed her tweets on the matter as ‘nonsense’ and said Trump didn’t have her facts straight.
- Trump tweeted, "with 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner-city communities."
- But Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot said Ivanka’s tweet was inaccurate and misleading about the circumstances of the violence, saying, "it’s important when we’re talking about people’s lives to actually get the facts correct."
- Lightfoot said she was "not going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about."
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Ivanka Trump’s efforts to spotlight gun violence in Chicago spectacularly backfired when the city’s mayor slammed her tweets on the matter as ‘nonsense’ and said Trump didn’t have her facts straight.
Trump tweeted about gun violence in Chicago following two deadly mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio that killed 31 people and injured dozens of others over the weekend.
"As we grieve over the evil mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, let us not overlook that Chicago experienced its deadliest weekend of the year," Trump wrote, adding, "with 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner-city communities every day."
But Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot was none too happy with Trump’s portrayal of gun violence in Chicago, excoriating her tweets as inaccurate and un-informed at a Tuesday meeting with Chicago police, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Lightfoot said that Trump didn’t even get the basic facts of the shootings correct, saying, "it wasn’t a playground, it was a park. It wasn’t seven dead. It wasn’t 52 wounded in one incident, which is what this suggests. It’s misleading … it’s important when we’re talking about people’s lives to actually get the facts correct, which one can easily do if you actually cared about getting it right."
Trump’s tweet citing inaccurate information about the Chicago shooting received over 4,000 re-tweets and 19,000 likes.
The mayor said of Trump, "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."
Lightfoot added that she was going to focus on her mission of working with law enforcement and community members and was "not going to be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about."
According to a Tribune tracker of violence in the city, 293 people have died by homicide so far through July 2019, with a majority of those cases resulting from shootings.
Trump’s father, President Donald Trump, is expected to visit both Dayton and El Paso on Wednesday.
Read more:
There have been 255 mass shootings in the US so far in 2019 — here’s the full list
See Also:
- Trump incorrectly blamed mental illness for mass shootings, but blocked a rule that would have made it harder for some people with mental illnesses to buy guns
- Here’s the House gun control legislation Mitch McConnell refuses to take up in the Senate after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton
- Violent video games are played all over the world, but mass shootings are a uniquely American problem
Source: Business Insider – gpanetta@businessinsider.com (Grace Panetta)