Former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee has previously said that God already solved racism, so it's not too surprising that his latest statements about how race and police shootings isn't sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. But when The Washington Postdid a fact check feature on Huckabee's statement that "more white people have been shot by police officers this past year than minorities," the Huckster did not like the results.
The Post wrote that Huckabee's statement, while technically accurate in terms of raw numbers, lacked some much needed context. The paper reported that 494 white people were shot by police in 2015, compared to 258 black people. However when you consider that blacks make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population, the numbers tell a different story—black people are three times as likely as whites to be shot by police officers.
When the fact checkers pointed out that Huckabee's statement was misleading, he fired back.
"It's not me that needs to be 'fact checked.' It's the Post--I only said exactly what YOU reported. My comments were 100 percent factual. The pure facts also reveal that 94 percent of those killed by police are men, so by your 'proportional' standards, the real movement in America should be 'Male Lives Matter.'"
Of those 990 people shot by cops in 2015, the vast majority, 948 of them, were men.
It has been a tense few days since the fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La. and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., followed by fatal shootings of five police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. Huckabee isn't the only prominent Republican who has downplayed the race factor in those shootings in the days that followed. On Sunday, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on TV to claim police aren't really a danger to black people, black crime is.
