How Trump's and Clinton's claims in their speeches after the Orlando shooting stack up

By Jill Ornitz

June 13, 2016 5:30 PM PT

In competing addresses Monday after the Orlando nightclub massacre, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both sought to frame the political debate surrounding the mass shooting on their terms.

Trump renewed his call for tougher immigration laws and reaffirmed his commitment to temporarily banning Muslim immigration as president.

Clinton called on Americans to unite and laid out a plan for working with U.S. allies, beefing up resources for law enforcement and strengthening gun laws.

Here's a look at some of their assertions and how they measure up to the facts:

Trump: Clinton wants to “disarm law-abiding Americans.”

Trump said, as he has before, that Clinton wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

"Her plan is to disarm law-abiding Americans, abolishing the 2nd Amendment and leaving only the bad guys and terrorists with guns," Trump said in New Hampshire.

Clinton has pushed back against this claim, telling voters in California before the state's primary, "We think about how we can save lives — that’s my goal. This has absolutely nothing to do with taking away the rights of responsible gun owners. We can do this consistent with the 2nd Amendment."

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Clinton does advocate for tougher background checks for prospective firearms buyers. She supports legislation that would make it harder for people convicted of domestic abuse or the mentally ill to obtain weapons and holding gun manufacturers and dealers responsible for acts committed with their weapons.

Trump: The FBI “cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we're letting into America.”

Trump also accused President Obama of failing to give the intelligence community the resources to combat terrorism.

"We're importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president," Trump said. "Even our own FBI director has admitted that we cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we're letting into America."

That claim was deemed “mostly false” by PolitiFact when then-Republican candidate Ted Cruz made it during a CNN debate in December.

Trump called the process to obtain a visa "easily exploited," but the Department of Homeland Security has a multi-step process that applicants must go through to be accepted as a refugee.

The agency has an additional step that provides "enhanced review for Syrian applicants" seeking to enter the U.S.

Obama said this month that the U.S. has “been able to admit about 2,500” Syrian refugees in recent months, and he has said that the U.S. will accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over a year, a number far lower than refugee advocates would have liked.

The exodus of refugees from the Middle East and Africa has been called Europe’s biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II.

According to the White House, less than 1% of the global refugee population meets the first requirement to be eligible for resettlement in the U.S.

And, according to the State Department, international refugees “are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to our country.”

Trump on Syrian refugee totals

Trump has a mixed record when it comes to discussing how many Syrian refugees the government wants to let in to the U.S.

Last fall, Trump asserted Obama wanted to allow 250,000 Syrian refugees to resettle, which was later debunked by PolitiFact.

Trump’s yearly immigration numbers are also off, according to the State Department.

“Each year the United States permanently admits 100,000 immigrants from the Middle East and many more from Muslim countries outside of the Middle East,” he said. “Our government has been admitting ever-growing numbers, year after year, without any effective plan for our own security.”

But the State Department has proposed a ceiling of 85,000 international refugees allowed into the country this year, an increase from 2015’s cap of 70,000.

Trump's assessment of Hillary Clinton’s plan for letting in Syrian refugees is relatively consistent with an interview Clinton gave in September, but his choice of statistics implied a stratospheric increase.

“Having learned nothing from these attacks, she now plans to massively increase admissions without a screening plan including a 500% increase in Syrian refugees coming into our country,” Trump said in his speech.

Clinton has said she’d like to increase the 10,000 cap Obama has instituted and increase it to 65,000.

"I would like to see us move from what is a good start with 10,000 to 65,000 and begin immediately to put into place the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in," Clinton said on “Face the Nation.”

Clinton: People with suspected terrorism links “shouldn't be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.”

Federal law is specific about who is barred from buying a gun. The list of prohibited buyers includes convicted felons, those convicted of a domestic violence offense, fugitives from justice, drug addicts and those who have been judged by a court to be "mentally defective." Being investigated by law enforcement does not bar a person from buying a gun.

Clinton said, “If the FBI is watching you for a suspected terrorist link, you shouldn't be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.... If you're too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America."

But the Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, was not under investigation when he bought the guns he used.

According to a 2015 government analysis, people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watchlist successfully passed the background check required to purchase firearms more than 90% of the time, with more than 2,043 approvals from 2004 to 2014. Gun rights advocates argue that placement on such a list doesn't give people adequate due process to justify revoking their constitutional right to bear arms.

Full Coverage: Orlando nightclub shooting »

Clinton: “Hate crimes against American Muslims and mosques have tripled after Paris and San Bernardino.”

No government data are available for the period Clinton specified. Her campaign said the statistic came from a December report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, which relied on a single month of U.S. media reports of "anti-Muslim hate crime attacks," beginning with the Nov. 13, 2015, date of the Paris attacks. It then compared that number with a different data source, the average monthly totals for the previous five years of anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI.

The study's author, Cal State San Bernardino professor Brian Levin, acknowledged limitations to his findings, including comparing disparate data sets. And because he measured only one month, he couldn't say whether the increase he observed in December persisted until now, as Clinton implied. Levin said reports of hate crimes generally peak in the month after a terrorist attack and then fall back to something near the average.

The Associated Press was used in compiling this report.

Twitter: @jill_ornitz

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