Senator Cruz is perhaps the biggest gun rights backer among the GOP candidates for president.
And he doesn’t miss the chance to attack anyone on the topic, from President Obama to Democratic Senator Feinstein.
He made this claim about Feinstein recently on CNN:
“I’ll tell you who I do take at her word is Senator Dianne Feinstein, who said: If I could go to Mr. America, Mrs. America, and say, hand over your guns, I want all of your guns, I would do it.’ I believed Dianne when she said that.”
We wondered, did Feinstein really say this? Or was there more to the story?
It turns out Cruz left a gaping hole in the story.
Cruz was referring to a statement Feinstein made in a 1995 interview on “60 Minutes,” according to Cruz’s campaign spokesman.
But as “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl makes clear in the lead up to her interview, the two were discussing a ban on assault weapons — not all guns, as Cruz says.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein worked for more than a year to get the assault weapons bill passed, in the face of ferocious opposition from the National Rifle Association. She says she got the best she could.
Here’s Feinstein:
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, ‘Mr. and Mrs. America turn ‘em all in,’ I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren’t here.”
Feinstein’s bill banned 19 types of military-style firearms. But it left a huge loophole because it did not apply to any of the hundreds of thousands of assault weapons made before the ban went into effect.
With this basic bit of context, it’s clear that Feinstein was not talking about wanting “an outright ban” on all guns.
Cruz’s comment on CNN is a gross distortion of what the California senator said.
We rate his claim False.
Read full versions of all our fact checks at PolitiFactCalifornia.com.
This story was produced by Capital Public Radio