A viral Facebook post shared over 12,000 times claims Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said owning a gun should be as hassle-free as owning a car.

Verdict: False

Check Your Fact didn’t find any record of Cruz making the statement. A spokesperson for Cruz’s office said the comment is fake.

Fact Check:

The recent mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado have sparked a renewed debate about gun control measures, according to The New York Times. The viral March 24 Facebook post claims, “Ted Cruz says owning a gun should be as hassle free as owning a car which as I recall requires a license and registration.”

The claim about Cruz allegedly making the comment about gun and car ownership also went viral on Twitter, where one tweet has garnered over 59,000 retweets and 443,000 likes to date. Neither the Facebook post nor the tweet cited a source.

Check Your Fact didn’t find any evidence the senator said “owning a gun should be as hassle-free as owning a car.” (RELATED: Did Ted Cruz Tweet, ‘I’ll Believe In Climate Change When Texas Freezes Over’?)

A search of C-SPAN, the video-clip editing service Grabien and media reports didn’t turn up a record of Cruz making the comment. It does not appear in press releases put out by his office or in the congressional record. The remark also cannot be found on his social media accounts.

A spokesperson for Cruz’s office confirmed to Check Your Fact in a phone call that the quotation is not real.

It’s possible that the claim stemmed from comments made at a March 23 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. During the hearing, Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy said, “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. 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.”

While Cruz did accuse his Democratic colleagues of “ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” he did not mention cars during his remarks at the hearing, a transcript shows.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect the correct state that Cruz represents.