On Sunday, CNN commentator LZ Granderson made two accurate but misleading claims about gun violence in America. He also made one completely false claim and blatantly contradicted himself about the nature of possible solutions to gun violence.

Via the Real Clear Politics transcript, Granderson told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that (emphasis added):

The thing that I find so frustrating is that we only really talk about guns in this conversation when there is a quote-unquote “terrorist attack.” And we define a terrorist attack as being when a Muslim individual goes in and kills Americans because when a white guy goes into a church and sprays down nine black people who were praying, that’s not a terrorist attack; that’s a lone wolf. So that’s one frustrating part to me.

The other is that there’s 30,000 people, 30,000 Americans die every year from gun violence. They’re not all from Muslims. So there are different aspects of the gun control conversation that needs to happen. And it needs to happen in silos because they’re all individual. There isn’t a single answer or even two answers that’s going to solve all these problems.

There are gun laws in Indiana that makes it easy to purchase. So if you can have strict gun laws in Chicago, you can be a criminal that just drives over to the next state and hauls guns back over to Chicago. That’s the reason why you have these problems.

Misleading on ‘Gun Violence’

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “33,636 persons died from firearm injuries in the United States” in 2013. So Granderson’s estimate was pretty close, and technically violence is committed when someone commits suicide.

But in defining each of those deaths as “gun violence” in context to a discussion about inner city violence in Chicago and the mass shootings in Orlando and South Carolina, Granderson also misled viewers to think that these were intentional assaults from one person to another.

In fact, the CDC’s data shows that 63 percent “of firearm injury deaths in 2013 were suicide …” That rate is pretty consistent year to year, with over 61 percent of firearm deaths in 2010 due to suicide and the CDC noting that from 2012 to 2013 “the rate for firearm suicide did not change significantly.”

The Blame Game

Granderson indicated lax gun laws in Indiana are the reason for high gun violence in Chicago. But an October 2015 USA TODAY article cited a report that “19% of the illegal guns in Chicago” recovered from 2009 to 2013 “came from Indiana…”

According to the same article, the report — issued by Chicago authorities — found that “nearly 60% of illegal guns recovered in the city from 2009 to 2013 were first sold in states with more lax gun laws.”

However, as Granderson noted, there are many factors that affect gun violence nationwide and in inner cities. A Department of Justice report cited by USA TODAY and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows that criminal weapons convictions went down 35 percent between 2005 and 2015, and down 15.5 percent from 2010 to 2015. While the TRAC analysis does not discuss why there are fewer convictions, the results may mean that thousands of firearm-wielding criminals have been left on the streets since 2005 instead of being put behind bars.

Another factor could be sociology and individual decision-making. According to FBI data gathered from 2000 to 2010, 47 percent of all homicide victims nationwide were black, and 40 percent of people who committed homicide were black.

That data set had several caveats, but the race data is similar to that reported by Pew, which noted that blacks made up just 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2010, but were 55 percent of gun homicide victims.

Contradictions

According to Granderson, “There isn’t a single answer or even two answers that’s going to solve all these problems.” Only moments later, he states that getting weapons across state lines is “the reason why you have these problems [of gun violence]” in Chicago.

In Conclusion

Granderson’s two big picture claims have elements of truth, but they take that truth out of context to create a misleading picture of gun violence in Chicago and nationwide. Additionally, he contradicted himself about whether there is a silver bullet solution to gun violence.

Granderson does deserve credit for pointing out that solutions to gun violence are mostly discussed after mass shootings, which are a tiny percentage of all firearms-related homicides in the country, and of total annual gun deaths. However, he then goes on to say

we only really talk about guns in this conversation when there is a quote-unquote ‘terrorist attack.’ And we define a terrorist attack as being when a Muslim individual goes in and kills Americans because when a white guy goes into a church and sprays down nine black people who were praying, that’s not a terrorist attack; that’s a lone wolf.

A Google search for “‘gun control’ ‘South Carolina'” between the dates of June 1, 2015 and July 1, 2015 brings up, just on the first page of results, stories about the Charleston shooting that discuss gun control. These stories were published by ideologically diverse news outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post and The Washington Times, traditional news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and even the British publication The Economist.

While the term “terrorist” was often avoided after the Charleston shooting referenced by Granderson, including by the head of the FBI, many politicians immediately jumped to take political advantage of the shooting to call for further regulating the firearms industry.

Editor’s note: This piece has been corrected from its original publication that misstated the percentage of firearms that are purchased in Indiana and illegally brought to Chicago. It also has been updated to more accurately describe the potential consequences of fewer criminal weapons convictions.