No evidence Ted Cruz made statement about guns, cars

Days after a Colorado gunman opened fire in a grocery store, social media users accused Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, of saying gun ownership should be "hassle free." 

"Ted Cruz says owning a gun should be as hassle free as owning a car which as I recall requires a license and registration," said one Facebook post shared thousands of times.

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

We did not find any evidence that the Texas senator said "owning a gun should be as hassle free as owning a car," as the Facebook post claimed he did. A spokesperson for Cruz’s office said the senator never made such a statement.

PolitiFact searched Google, the Nexis news database and TVEyes, a media monitoring service. We also queried Cruz’s official Twitter accounts and Politwoops, a project from ProPublica that tracks deleted tweets from Cruz and other politicians. 

The unsubstantiated quote appears to have taken off after a Twitter user shared it to their more than 11,000 followers, according to Hoaxy, a social media analysis tool. We reached out to that Twitter user, as well as the person who posted the claim to Facebook, but we did not hear back.

One Twitter user who shared the same claim pointed PolitiFact to a 2013 Senate hearing. But Cruz did not make the claim about cars and guns during that hearing, either.

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Cruz did make news during a March 23, 2021, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, when he accused Democrats pushing for gun control of "ridiculous theater." One tweet from that day referenced Cruz’s comments and called for regulating gun ownership more like car ownership.

Cruz did not draw an analogy between owning a gun and owning a car when he spoke at the hearing. But other lawmakers did. After the Texas senator finished his statement, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., brought up drunk drivers in a comment that also generated headlines. 

"I’m not trying to perfectly equate these two, but we have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people," Kennedy said. "We ought to try to combat that too. But I think what many folks on my side of the aisle are saying is that the answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers."

The Facebook post purporting to quote Cruz is unsubstantiated. So we rate it False.