With people like David Hogg and Gabby Giffords, we’re supposed to hold their status as a survivor as somehow sacred. They can’t be questioned over the validity of their positions because they survived, man. They know and stuff. We should all just listen to them because they know better than we do because of their experiences.

Of course, these same people often ignore pro-gun survivors like Kyle Kashuv or Rep. Steve Scalise.

However, mass shootings aren’t new, and so it’s not surprising that there’s a survivor lobbying Congress right now, using her experiences to explain and support her position to lawmakers. She’ll probably be ignored by many, though, because she wants fewer gun laws.

Since surviving a 1991 mass shooting at a Luby’s in Killeen, Suzanna Gratia Hupp has lobbied for looser gun control laws that she says could have allowed her to save the 23 victims, including both of her parents.

“I reached for the gun in my purse on the floor next to me,” Hupp told a congressional committee Wednesday during a hearing on the economic costs of gun violence. She recounted the moments after the killer, George Hennard, crashed his pickup into the restaurant where she was eating with her parents and opened fire. “But then I realized that a few months earlier I had made the stupidest decision of my life. My gun was 100 yards away, dutifully left in my car to obey the law because at that time in the state of Texas, carrying a handgun was illegal.”

Hupp’s campaign to ease restrictions on guns has spanned several decades. She won a seat in the Texas House, where she served for 10 years. On Wednesday, she told her story during a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee.

Hupp, a chiropractor, was invited by fellow Republicans, and she focused her testimony on what she called “the high cost of gun control.”

Testimony from Hupp that was recorded years ago has always struck me as being one of the most powerful reasons for legalized carry in some form or fashion.

As noted, Hupp had a firearm. It was in her car where she was required by law to leave it. As a result, she watched her father be gunned down because of that law.

It’s stuck with me.

However, the question is whether any anti-gunner on the committee would listen to the experiences of someone who would have been the “good guy with a gun” had the law not tied their hands? We’re told that the “good guy with a gun” is a myth, yet here’s someone who had every chance to be one except for a law that would have allowed her to have been armed.

After all, as anti-gunners like to say, if it would have saved just one life…

Anyway, since the Lubby’s Diner massacre in 1991, Hupp has been a vehement pro-gun voice. Yet despite this, she has never had the profile of a David Hogg or Emma Gonzalez or any of the Parkland crowd. She’s not as well known as Gabby Giffords or James Brady, even.

She damn well should be, though, because she has some experience in a mass shooting that’s actually relevant.