Donald Trump

Fact Checking Day Two of the Republican National Convention

Donald Trump, Jr. took to the Republican National Convention stage Tuesday night and honed in on Hillary Clinton, calling out the Democratic contender for overreaching on gun rights and the Second Amendment.

“She says she’d issue executive orders to take away Americans’ guns,” he told the crowd in Cleveland.

That claim is partly true. Clinton’s gun control platform says she wouldn’t hesitate to use ‘administrative action,’ but only if Congress fails to pass a law requiring background checks on all gun sales, private and registered.

“Just look at how effective those laws have been in inner city Chicago, a city with the toughest gun laws in our nation where 70 people were murdered last month alone,” Donald Trump, Jr. continued.

This statement is largely true. Gun violence is ravaging the streets of Chicago, and there were 70 homicides in June alone, according to the Chicago Tribune. It should be mentioned, however, that four of those deaths did not involve guns.

Another focus of Tuesday night was the Constitution.

House Speaker Paul Ryan accused President Obama of overstepping the law of the land.

“The result is a record of discarded promises, empty gestures, phony strawman arguments, reforms put off forever, shady power plays like the one that gave us Obamacare, and constitutional limits brushed off as nothing,” he said in reference to the Obama administration.

It turns out those concerns are the same ones Ryan expressed about his own party’s nominee. In May, Ryan spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper about these concerns.

“Does he share our values and our principles on limited government, the proper role of the executive, adherence to the Constitution?” he said of Trump. “There are a lot of questions that conservatives, I think, are going to want answers to, myself included.”

In his speech last night, Ryan also blamed the president for “dividing America” by pitting groups against each other.

“Americans need to see beyond class and ethnicity,” Ryan said.

Perhaps the greatest criticisms against Donald Trump in his campaign for president are his inflammatory statements about Muslims and Mexicans.

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