CNN commentator Van Jones isn’t known for insightful commentary, as a general rule. He’s a die-hard progressive who never met an aspect of the liberal agenda he didn’t like…unless it wasn’t liberal enough.

However, because of his role on CNN, the man gets a pretty big platform. And how does he use it?

He proves himself to be a race-baiting moron who doesn’t even manage to get his race-baiting right.

CNN commentator Van Jones claimed Thursday that a “whole generation of young people” now sees the National Rifle Association (NRA) as the KKK because of the NRA’s “destructive role” in the debate on gun control.

Van Jones began by arguing that the NRA “has played a net destructive role for people who are trying to solve this problem.” He added that “there is a sense of fear and terror among people who are in elected office that if they even entertain certain notions that the NRA is going to drop a ton of bricks on them.”

Due to this fear, he said, “we haven’t had the kind of innovation, experimentation, trying of things—I don’t know of any of the things being proposed would make any difference at all yet, but we should know more than we know right now. We should have been able to try things and we haven’t been able to.”

“You have a whole generation of young people who essentially see the NRA as their enemy,” he then argued. “To them the NRA is like the KKK; it’s just some hostile force that is against them, that’s risking their lives.”

I’m sorry, but that’s rich.

The roots of gun control lie in the policies of the Klan and people who thought like the Klan. The idea of gun control in its early days was to disarm the black man, to make it impossible for him to defend himself against aggression from racists. Lynching, you see, is a much riskier proposition when your target has the means to fight back.

Southern lawmakers of the day passed gun control laws that were worded so they’d apply to anyone, but knew that no white sheriff would apply those rules to white men. They had to make the law look equal, but since they knew that enforcement would be discriminatory, that wasn’t really an issue.

As a son of the South who has lived here my whole life, I’m not proud of this part of our history, but it is what it is.

So for Jones to compare the NRA to the Klan…well, that just boggles the mind. It’s a comparison that makes no damn sense in any way, shape, or form. At least, not on the surface.

However, if you recognize that the attempt is to link the NRA and the Klan in the minds of the people, a feeble attempt at race-baiting in the gun debate, it makes more sense.

The KKK is a much-despised organization that is little more than a bad memory at this point. The running joke is that the single biggest payer of dues to the Klan is the FBI since most of its membership is made up of informants. There’s probably some truth to that joke.

Yet the name itself is still evocative. People still respond to the name the same as if crosses were burning in yards on a nightly basis. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

What is a bad thing, however, is trying to lump a civil rights organization like the NRA into the same pile. Then again, what else should we expect from a lightweight like Van Jones?