During an interview with an Albany radio station on Wednesday, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) reacted to calls for gun control following the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by claiming that “so many of these people that commit mass murders end up being Democrats.”

Tenney made that claim as she and host Fred Dicker talked about what they take to be an unfortunate implication of the Parkland shooting.

“What scares me most is that a lot of these legal gun owners are going to be targeted now,” Tenney said. “In their demographic, they have the least amount of crimes of virtually any other demographic.”

“Yeah, but they tend to vote Republican, they tend to be white,” Dicker replied. “Most gun crimes are occurring in what’s euphemistically called the ‘inner cities’ involving minorities, and they’re the ones that Democrats generally going to bend over backwards to protect, so you don’t hear about mandatory prison sentences for people involved in gun crimes say in Albany, New York, or downtown Utica.”

Tenney indicated she agreed with Dicker’s sentiment.

“Yeah, well, obviously there is a lot of politics in it, and it’s interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats, but the media doesn’t talk about that either,” she said.

You can listen to the exchange around the 33:40 mark of this audio clip:

It’d odd that Tenney would smear Democrats for purportedly being more inclined to be mass murderers, given that the Parkland gunman — 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz — can be seen donning a Trump hat in his Instagram profile picture, and also wore a Trump hat in school. Group chats obtained by CNN indicate that Cruz “repeatedly espoused racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views and displayed an obsession with violence and guns” — not the sort of interests typically associated with Democratic Party politics.


Also odd was Dicker’s comments about urban gun crimes, as Parkland is a suburban community known as one of Florida’s safest cities.

But Tenney often offers overheated rhetoric about Democrats. During an MSNBC interview in December, she dismissed concerns about the Republican tax cut bill increasing federal deficits with a rant about how New York is now “virtually a socialist economy.”

“We started the industrial revolution. It’s been eviscerated by leftist policies out of Andrew Cuomo” and Democrats, she said.

Then, during a CNN interview earlier this month, Tenney said she agreed with President Trump’s sentiment that Democrats who didn’t stand and applaud him at the State of the Union committed treason.

“I would say it was un-American, and they don’t love our country… I sat on the Democratic side, and I was frankly appalled by the behavior of Democrats,” she said.