I’ve really been trying hard not to feed into or off of the media outlets that depend on generating outrage in order to grow their audience and generate profits, but it’s tough, and I’m not always successful. And maybe I should have just ignored CNN’s Jim Acosta and his guest blithely accusing gun owners and Second Amendment activists of promoting human sacrifice, but it’s so maliciously stupid and off-target that I couldn’t let it pass unacknowledged.

CNN’s Jim Acosta agreed on Sunday with a liberal guest who compared Republicans not passing gun control to “mass human sacrifice” practiced by ancient societies.

Acosta, the network’s “chief domestic correspondent,” invited author Kurt Andersen onto his left-wing weekend program to discuss his new book that claims conservatives who oppose vaccines have brought “human sacrifice” to America.

So there’s problem number one. According to Andersen, it’s not just our refusal to embrace an anti-gun agenda that’s led to us promoting human sacrifice, but opposition to vaccines (and perhaps even vaccine mandates) as well. And of course, don’t forget climate change.

Basically, Andersen’s (and Acosta’s) argument boils down to “if you don’t wholeheartedly embrace whatever they’re demanding today, you’re okay with sacrificing human beings.”

Anderson compared lower vaccine rates among red states to “mass human sacrifices that took place in large complex empires not unlike ours,” before the duo pivoted to gun control.

“Perhaps, this revival of mass human sacrifice in the United States is just a passing thing that will go away but … on the other hand, the Republicans have, for years now, been doing a different kind of what is effectively mass human sacrifice in terms of gun deaths and eliminating all gun regulation,” Anderson said as Acosta jumped in.

“A maximalist view of freedom over lives,” Acosta said.

As opposed to Acosta’s position of maximum dumbassery over any genuine analysis or insight.

We could talk about the fact that about 75% of gun owners say they primarily own a firearm to protect human life, not to sacrifice it. We could point out the fact that putting gun control laws on the books doesn’t equate to a reduction in violent crime or lives lost, and accuse Acosta and Andersen of promoting human sacrifice on their own in the name of civilian disarmament.

We could discuss the fact that homicide rates declined in the decade after D.C.’s ban on handguns was overturned by the Supreme Court; an indication that, contra Acosta, the choice is not between our freedom and our lives but our freedom and those who promise security in exchange for restricting or obliterating our rights.

We could point to the hundreds of thousands (on the low end of estimates) of defensive gun uses each and every year, none of them acknowledged by Acosta and Andersen. We could share the stories of individuals who saved their lives and lost their jobs because of company policies requiring them to be unarmed on the clock, along with those who lost their lives because they were unable to protect themselves while at work, and ask who’s really on the side of human sacrifice here?

The thing is, I don’t think Jim Acosta and Kurt Andersen are any more into human sacrifice than the average American gun owner. I just think they don’t give a damn about making a fundamentally dishonest and dishonorable argument, even one that’s so superficially silly.

I also don’t think they have any real idea about what they want, other than to snap their fingers and create a magically gun-free world. Both Acosta and Andersen have expressed support for criminal justice reform in the past (though Acosta is apparently more of a fan when Democrats occupy the White House), yet they don’t seem to realize that their favorite gun control laws are already causing a huge amount of harm by turning individuals into felons for simply having their legally-owned guns in their car, or possessing a gun in their home without a government-issued permit.

This is what gun control looks like when it’s working; thousands of individuals, a disproportionate number of them young black and Hispanic men, thrown in prison for a few years, given a masters class in criminality while behind bars, and saddled with a felony record when they’re released.

Andersen and Acosta, like most liberals, have no problem with any of these folks being able to bond out of jail at no cost while they await trial, but they balk at the idea that carrying a gun without a license shouldn’t be a crime in the first place. In fact, they would expand our gun control laws to the point that tens of millions more legal gun owners would become criminals overnight, simply for continuing to possess the guns and magazines they lawfully purchased.

There is no moral high ground to be found in Acosta and Andersen’s idiocratic position on gun control, which, if ever enacted nationally, would lead to an explosion of incarceration, widespread civil disobedience, and another dramatic surge in violent crime that would make our current crime spike seem positively mild in comparison.

Most of us know there’s really only one group of people out there who are okay with human sacrifice: the violent criminals who prey on the innocent every day. And we know that gun control laws hurt the law-abiding far more than they impact violent criminals, which is why residents of one of America’s most violent (and gun controlled) cities are flocking to gun stores instead of demanding their own Second Amendment rights be curtailed in the name of safety.