Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

[Q]: Paragraph: "Bounciest Democrat on November's statewide ballot? It might be Hank Gilbert, making his second hard charge for state agriculture commissioner versus Todd Staples, the Republican who topped him four years ago. Gilbert, ever prowling for issues, recently trumpeted that the Texas Department of Agriculture is looking at buying thousands of stress balls -- squeezable toys. He said in a Sept. 24 press release: ""Make no mistake, Texans love their balls: footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls. But 300,000 stress balls? It seems a little extreme, but that's the quantity of grape, barbell, and book-shaped polyurethane stress balls the Texas Department of Agriculture could be spending taxpayer dollars on...""  Really? To our inquiry, Gilbert's campaign provided Web links to the agriculture agency's June request for bids as well as a September post on a state website indicating that a $99,000 contract to provide promotional materials was awarded to a Massachusetts company, Oceans Promotions. We downloaded the June 29 bid-request package from a site for state requisitions overseen by the state comptroller's office. The package shows the department was seeking bids to provide up to 300,000 stress ""relievers,"" which we're guessing are not balls because they're not round. Precisely, the package says, the agency sought bids to make ""promotional items with logo imprints to follow through on (the) TDA Food and Nutrition Texans Bring It Campaign,"" with the items to include grape-shaped stress relievers with ""Texans Bring It"" written on them or ""Eating Right,"" which would be made of polyurethane and be two inches high by three inches wide. The package says a second set of stress relievers, each one called ""Dumbbell,"" would be imprinted ""Texans Bring It"" and ""Exercise"" and be five inches high by 1.8 inches in diameter. A third stress reliever would be imprinted ""Book"" and ""Texans Bring It,"" according to the bid package, while other promotional items would include pencils, buttons and bumperstickers. The package says the bids were sought for various quantities, starting from 2,500 and topping out at 100,000 each. It electronically links to a Branders.com site showing what the agency wanted the stress relievers to look like (our interpretation: bunches of purple grapes). Is all this a real deal? To our inquiry, Bryan Black, Staples' spokesman, replied via e-mail: ""An invitation for bid was issued for these federally funded educational items to reduce the $5.8 billion avoidable health care expenditures, paid by taxpayers, associated with overweight and obesity health problems."" We followed up with Black, asking if it's accurate to conclude that up to 300,000 of the stress relievers are being purchased. We also wondered why the purchase was being made. Black said he'd limit his comment to his e-mailed statement. Surely the agency would pipe up if Gilbert got its purchase plans wrong." Claim: Hank Gilbert Says the Texas Department of Agriculture seeks to purchase up to 300,000 promotional stress balls.
[A]: Hank Gilbert says Texas Department of Agriculture could be buying up to 300,000 stress balls


[Q]: Paragraph: After a spate of mass shootings in early August 2019 in the United States, gun violence once again became a major topic of political debate in the country, and many expressed their views on potential solutions to the problem. The left-leaning Facebook page Occupy Democrats suggested that tighter gun-ownership regulations could help to reduce levels of firearms-related fatalities. On Aug. 7, the page posted a meme that claimed: “In Massachusetts, to buy a gun you have to take a four-hour gun safety course, get character references from two people, and have a one-on-one interview with a police officer. Oh, and it has the lowest gun death rate in America. Let’s do this everywhere.”    We received inquiries from readers about the accuracy of that two-part claim. On the whole, the Occupy Democrats meme had a high degree of accuracy. Elements of the meme appeared to have been copied from a Facebook post earlier on Aug. 7 by U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. The meme itself was accompanied by text that read:  “‘Adjusted for age and population, the gun fatality rate in Massachusetts for 2016 was the lowest in the U.S. And that’s how it’s been for most of the last 30 years, although sometimes another state, like Hawaii, which also has very strict gun laws, ends up with a slightly lower rate. '” That text is actually a quotation taken from a May 6, 2018, article published by the Huffington Post, which went on to provide the following disclaimer: “Just how much that low rate has to do with the state’s gun laws is a matter of ongoing debate, even among experts. Pretty much any legitimate study is going to rely on assumptions that will be open to valid criticism; separating out cause and effect can be virtually impossible. But the available research provides a good reason to think Massachusetts laws in general and the permit system in particular have made violence less likely.” This fact check won’t attempt to rule on the validity of any claim that relatively strict gun regulations in Massachusetts are the primary or exclusive cause of that state’s purportedly low rate of firearms-related deaths, merely whether both factors are present there. Massachusetts state law certainly contains comparatively stringent requirements for obtaining and renewing firearms licenses, as well as purchasing and carrying firearms, and the claims made in the Occupy Democrats meme were largely accurate. In Massachusetts, anyone who wishes to purchase or carry a firearm must obtain a firearms license, of which there are two kinds: a license to carry and a firearms identification card (FID), the latter of which relates to rifles and shotguns. Applications for firearms licenses are processed by local police forces, and a 2014 state law gave law-enforcement agencies relatively wide authority and discretion to deny license applications, through a court process, where a license applicant poses a demonstrable risk to public safety. All first-time applicants for a license to carry or an FID must complete a one-day MA Certified Firearms Safety Course or a Basic Hunter Education Course, as part of the application. So the meme’s claim is accurate as regards first-time license applicants, but not for those who already have one, who are not required to undergo training every time they wish to purchase a new gun, for example. Furthermore, all applicants (whether first-time applicants or those applying to renew their firearms license) must provide two character references, as outlined in the state-issued “LTC/FID/Machine gun application,” which can be viewed here. The meme is accurate in this regard. Finally, Massachusetts state law does not oblige a “licensing authority” (typically a police force) to require an in-person interview with license applicants, but many police forces, including the largest in the state, Boston’s, do require such an interview. So that obligation is not prescribed in law, but is a practical necessity for many firearms-license applicants, which partially vindicates the meme’s claim in this regard. This was true in 2016, as the Huffington Post article (which Occupy Democrats indirectly cited as its source) outlined, though not quite accurate in 2017. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks gun deaths (along with many other cause of death) in each state every year. The CDC also calculates gun death rates in each state every year — that is, the number of firearms-related deaths per 100,000 people living in the state, after taking into account and standardizing age distributions across states. In its standard measure of gun deaths, the CDC counts all forms of firearms fatalities including homicides, suicides and accidental discharges. In 2016, Massachusetts had the lowest age-adjusted gun death rate in the country, with 3.4 fatalities per 100,000 people. Rhode Island, New York, Hawaii and Connecticut had the next-lowest death rates, while Alaska, Alabama and Louisiana had the highest rates of gun deaths in the U.S., with 23.3, 21.5 and 21.3 fatalities per 100,000 people, respectively:  Along with New York, Massachusetts had the joint second-lowest gun death rate in 2017, with 3.7 per 100,000 people, behind Hawaii, which had 2.5 such fatalities per 100,000 people:  As the Huffington Post article pointed out, Massachusetts regularly has among the lowest annual rates of gun deaths in the United States. As well as in 2016, it also had the lowest rate in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2009, 2012 and 2015,  The chart below shows the age-adjusted gun death rate of every state, taking into account all gun deaths between 1999 and 2017. Massachusetts had the second-lowest gun death rate over that 19-year period, behind Hawaii. Louisiana, Alaska, the District of Columbia and Mississippi had the highest:  Although the Occupy Democrats Facebook post clearly specified that the basis of the claim in the meme were the figures for 2016, a year in which Massachusetts did indeed have the lowest gun death rate in the country, the meme itself did not make that clear. Taken on its face, the meme was claiming that Massachusetts had the lowest rate of gun deaths in either 2019 (the year in which it was posted) or 2018 (the most recent full year). The state may well ultimately be shown to have the lowest rate of gun deaths in the country during those years, but CDC data for 2019 and 2018 will not be available until 2021 and 2020, respectively. On the whole, the Occupy Democrats meme was highly accurate, though not perfectly so. Claim: Massachusetts has certain strict gun-ownership requirements and the lowest rate of gun deaths in the United States. 
[A]: What's true: Massachusetts requires gun-license applicants to provide character references; first-time applicants must complete a one-day safety training course; and many police departments require an in-person interview before approving license applications. Massachusetts regularly has either the lowest or second-lowest rate of gun deaths in the United States. What's false: In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, Massachusetts had the second-lowest rate of gun deaths, but data for 2018 and 2019 are not yet available. The gun-license requirements set out in the meme do not necessarily apply to all applicants.


[Q]: Paragraph: The outbreak initially took hold in eastern France, where hospitals have become overwhelmed, and has been spreading west. Doctors in the greater Paris region have said their intensive care units will be full by the end of the weekend. “We are fighting a battle that will take time,” Philippe said at a news conference. “The first two weeks of April will be harder than the two we have just lived through.”  To free up intensive care beds in worst-hit areas, the army and emergency workers were this weekend stepping up the transfer of patients to less-affected regions, using a military helicopter and a specially adapted train. By Saturday, the coronavirus had claimed 2,314 lives in France, with more than 37,575 confirmed cases, according to official figures. The government tally only accounts for those dying in hospital but authorities say they will be able to compile data on deaths in retirement homes from next week, which is likely to result in a marked increase in registered fatalities. In southern France, the Occitanie health authority reported 11 deaths in a nursing home near Montpellier. Dozens more elderly people are known to have died in separate cases. Health Minister Olivier Veran said he would be instructing care homes to isolate every single elderly resident in an effort to curb the virus among the most vulnerable. “We need to go further to protect the vulnerable in nursing homes,” Veran said. As the number of cases balloons and hospitals struggle, doctors, carers and police have complained of an acute shortage of protective gear. Veran said the government had ordered more than 1 billion face masks, most from China, to build up supplies, with the country using some 40 million every week during the crisis. Hospitals have scrambled to add intensive car beds and canceled non-essential operations. There were now 10,000 intensive care beds nationwide, double the capacity when the outbreak began, and another 4,500 were targeted, Veran said. But doctors warned beds alone were insufficient. “We lack manpower,” Djillali Annane, head of intensive care at the Raymond Poincare hospital on the edge of Paris, told BFM TV. Medical students are being drafted in to help ease the staffing crunch. A decision would be taken in a week on a further extension of an unprecedented lockdown beyond April 15, the prime minister said. People in France can only leave their homes to buy groceries, go to work if essential or seek medical care. “We will only be able to see the first signs of what impact the lockdown has had toward the end of next week,” Arnaud Fontanet of the Institut Pasteur told the same news conference. Claim: Toughest weeks ahead in coronavirus fight, warns French PM.
[A]:
The next two weeks will be the toughest yet in the fight against coronavirus in France, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe warned on Saturday as his government raced to add intensive care beds and source protective gear.