An image shared on Facebook claims Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once said, “Owning guns is not a right… If it were a right, it would be in the Constitution.”

Verdict: False

There is no evidence Ocasio-Cortez ever said the quote attributed to her in the Facebook post.

Fact Check:

The viral image features two panels: one of Ocasio-Cortez overlaid with the alleged quote and another of a scene from the movie “The Cat in the Hat.” That panel includes text that says, “You’re not just wrong, you’re stupid.” (RELATED: Did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Say, ‘Jesus Was A Lot Like Trump, Both Con Artists’?)

There is, however, no evidence that Ocasio-Cortez ever made such a statement about gun ownership. The Daily Caller News Foundation searched for media outlets attributing the quote to her but only found other fact-checkers debunking it. The statement also does not appear on Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter accounts or in ProPublica’s archive of her deleted tweets.

Further adding to the post’s dubiousness, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges the Second Amendment on her campaign website. In one section, she advocates that the “Founding Fathers did not have assault weapons in mind when they wrote” the Second Amendment, and she states that cities and states “have managed to cut gun violence significantly without running afoul” of it in another section.

The congresswoman has been a popular target for misinformation since getting elected to Congress, with this misattributed quote circulating since at least January 2019, according to the fact-checking website Snopes.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].