Fact-checking Tuesday night's town hall

John McGuire on gun deaths, tariffs, energy imports, and his odometer.

After getting considerable grief for being out of touch with his constituents, John McGuire held his second town hall Tuesday night by phone.

Unlike a lot of the congressman’s critics, I didn’t think the calls were screened to favor him. But I can’t explain the comment posted on his official Facebook page by an account called Amherst County Republican Committee: “Congressman, I haven’t got my script yet. I can’t remember if I’m called 5 or 7.” (I assume they meant to type “caller.”) My first thought was it must be a spoof account set up to parody Republicans, in which case it’s a good joke. But if that’s what it is, they’re doing a good job of hiding the parody part. The account looks pretty straight to me. Maybe it’s real and got hacked?

Anyway, my sense that calls weren’t screened is just based on the nature of the ones that got through. Some callers had pointed questions, while others barely made sense. One woman asked what McGuire can do about property taxes—which is nothing, he explained, since they’re levied by state and local governments. Another expressed concern for a man she saw on TV who said he’d been scammed out of his “SIMS check.” (McGuire was understandably puzzled and referred her to his district office.) These didn’t strike me as questions that would pass a careful screening process—staffers don’t knowingly set their boss up to NOT have an answer for a constituent.

But when he did get serious inquiries, McGuire made several claims that deserve a fact-check. Here’s a short and probably incomplete list.

1. “Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the country, and they have the most deaths by guns.”

True, but it doesn’t make the point he wants it to.

Chicago does have strict gun laws, and it does have more gun-related deaths than any other city in the country—a fact that’s made it a favorite target of the anti-gun-law crowd. But the implication that gun laws don’t reduce gun violence is wrong. When you adjust for population size, cities and states with stricter gun laws have lower rates of gun violence.

Top 5 cities by per-capita gun deaths in 2023: Birmingham AL, Memphis TN, St. Louis MO, Portsmouth VA, and Camden NJ.

By this measure, Chicago is safer than several cities in Virginia. It ranks 40th in per-capita gun deaths, lower than Portsmouth, Hampton, Roanoke, Newport News, and Richmond.

Top 5 states by per-capita gun deaths in 2022: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama, Missouri.

California, with the strongest gun laws in the country, ranks 44th in gun deaths per capita.

McGuire also mentioned using a gun to defend your home. Each year, there are roughly 1,300 “defensive gun uses” in the United States—that’s .39 incidents per 100,000 people. You’re more likely to accidentally injure yourself or someone else than to use a gun in defense of your home.

2. “A month or so ago we brought over half a billion dollars in tariffs and it’s doubled in just one month.”

It’s true that tariff payments under the Trump regime roughly doubled between March and April, though the estimates of the dollar amount that I’m seeing are quite different from what McGuire said: $9 billion in March, nearly doubling to $17 billion in April.

McGuire getting the number wrong isn’t as problematic as his implication that tariffs are paid by other countries or foreign companies. As even Bing will tell you, they’re paid by companies here in America that import products from overseas. “We brought in billions in March and it doubled in just one month” is another way of saying “we raised taxes on American companies and consumers—and then we doubled them in just one month!” I’m sure we’ll be seeing that in McGurie’s re-election ads next year.

Another tariff-related claim: “Ninety countries are now coming to the table, trying to eliminate their tariffs on American goods and services.”

The Trump administration has been saying this a lot. They’ve never published a list of the 90 countries, though news reports have mentioned negotiations with the U.K., South Korea, India, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. Ninety countries would be nearly half the countries in the world—not impossible, but unlikely, and not to be taken seriously until they provide a verifiable list.

3. “Under the Biden administration, we were buying energy from countries that don't like us.”

He’s right, but the energy import/export picture is more complicated than he’s allowing. For one thing, the U.S. has been a net energy exporter for years. In fact, we exported more energy in 2023 than in any other year on record. But we also import energy products, including crude oil.

Why would we import crude if we already produce it domestically and have enough to sell abroad? The answer is pretty interesting.

U.S. refineries—especially those on the Gulf Coast—were built decades ago to process heavy, sour crude oil (so named because it’s thicker and higher in sulfur than other types). But much of the oil produced in the U.S. today is light, sweet crude, which many U.S. refineries aren’t optimized to process in bulk. To run efficiently, refineries blend imported heavy crude with domestic light crude.

According to government data, 87 percent of our imported crude oil comes from five countries:

1. Canada

2. Mexico

3. Saudi Arabia

4. Brazil

5. Venezuela

Until recently, Venezuela’s the only one on that list that would qualify as a country that doesn’t like us. But with his tariffs, taunts about the 51st state, and disregard for the western liberal order, Donald Trump is doing his best to alienate other countries on that list. It’s smart to reduce imports from adversaries. It’s not so smart to turn importers into adversaries.

4. “President Trump has promised we will not cut Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security.”

True! President Trump has promised that. But it’s not a promise he can keep. The budget blueprint calls for $880 billion in cuts to programs overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Its biggest program? Medicaid. The committee simply doesn’t oversee enough non-Medicaid funding to avoid cutting healthcare for the poor.

5. “I bought a pickup truck in 2019 with zero miles. I just went over 245,000 miles.”

This settles the mystery I wrote about earlier this week—it’s physically impossible for him to have covered that many miles in the four months he’s been in Congress. What he said last night makes it clear that he’s talking about the past six years. It’s entirely fair of him to use that number to make a point about how well he knows the 5th district, as he did last night. But it’s misleading at best to suggest—as he has also done—that it shows how much he’s shown up for constituents since taking office in January.