Cruz Slapped With 3 ‘Pinocchios’ for ‘Misleading’ Gun Legislation Claim

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is receiving three “Pinocchios” from The Washington Post for “misleading” claim about his 2013 gun legislation.

During an interview on Fox News’s “Hannity,” Cruz claimed if the gun legislation he introduced with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) passed, there is a “good chance” the Sutherland Springs church shooting in Texas in November of 2017 “never would have happened.”

Cruz explained, “The criminal who had committed a felony was ineligible to buy guns. The Obama Air Force never reported his conviction to the background database, and when he tried to illegally buy the gun, his conviction wasn’t there.”

He added, “He was allowed to buy the gun, and he murdered those people. If Grassley-Cruz had passed, they would have prosecuted him. They would’ve put him in jail, and he would have been in a jail cell instead of in that beautiful sanctuary.”

The Post notes Democrats “filibustered it, demanded 60 votes.” The publication called Cruz’s claim “highly misleading.”

The newspaper writes, “The man who committed the 2017 mass shooting in a Texas church, killing 26 and wounding 22, passed federal background checks and was able to purchase firearms because of a string of errors at the Air Force that Cruz’s legislation would not have prevented.”

According to the Post, Democrats and some Republicans advocated for expanding background checks to cover a wider variety of gun sales and banning the sale of some semiautomatic weapons in response to the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.