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Politics has always been ugly. There’s a reason it’s one of those topics of conversation you avoid in polite company. It’s known to devolve into ugliness quick.

There’s a good reason for that. Politics is often about things that matter, and we have very divergent views on how to deal with problems, which lends itself to a certain degree of ugliness.

That’s not to say that there’s no reason for it to get ugly. Some ideas and proponents are so idiotic that you’re almost required to point it out to them by whatever means necessary.

Sometimes, people accuse politicians of something, and some people believe it, even if those lawmakers didn’t do it. That’s what some New Hampshire Republicans are dealing with right now.

A women’s gun-control group says they were “mocked” by male lawmakers in New Hampshire on Tuesday, who wore pearl necklaces to a hearing they attended.

Dozens of members of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense attended a meeting of the New Hampshire House Criminal Justice and Safety Committee to show their support for a law that would allow firearms to be confiscated from risky individuals.

Moms Demand Action’s founder, Shannon Watts, tweeted on Tuesday that about half of the 10 male lawmakers on the committee were “wearing pearls” to mock her group.

INSIDER was only able to identify three lawmakers wearing pearls in the pictures Watts tweeted out. All three were male and Republican. None responded to our requests for comment.

However, other news sites were able to get a bit more information.

You see, the pearls were given to them by a pro-gun group. A Women’s pro-gun group.

The pearls weren’t meant to mock any activists, said Kimberly Morin, head of the Women’s Defense League of N.H., an organization that “defends 2nd Amendment rights.”

Pearls, she said, have been worn at hearings going back to 2016, when a bill came forward about allowing concealed carry without a permit, the New Hampshire Union Leader reported.

I know Kimberly. She and I worked together a couple of years back on a startup news site, and she’s a staunch defender of the Second Amendment. More than that, though, she has no problem with outright mockery against ideas that she thinks are stupid.

If this was mockery, she’d have said so.

My question is simple. So what if it was? At this point, Shannon Watts has clutched her pearls so many times that it boggles my mind that anyone takes her or her group seriously. If anyone is deserving of mockery, it’s Shannon and company.

Frankly, the whole idea of gun control, in general, is deserving of mockery. It’s an idea that fails every time it’s enacted, and the only conceivable answer for people like Shannon is to scream for more of what didn’t work. There’s a term for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

But despite their insanity, they continue to push for things like red flag laws–laws that failed to stop the mass shootings in Thousand Oaks, California or Aurora, Illinois–and never stop to consider that maybe the reason we oppose these laws is that we know how well they’ll work. We have their track record to check for proof.

No, these lawmakers weren’t mocking Moms Demand Action.

I’m kind of disappointed that they weren’t.