With millions upon millions of new gun owners in recent months, it’s safe to say that many of them are liberals buying guns for the first time. We can safely say as much because of not just how many have been sold, but also where many have been sold. We’ve seen people have their illusions about how easy it is to buy a gun be shattered by the harsh reality.

Many have looked at these liberal gun owners as hypocrites. After all, they’ve been trying to restrict our right to keep and bear arms for ages, but the moment they feel endangered, what do they do? They flock to the gun stores they’ve spent so long working to shut down.

However, a recent op-ed tries to present the case that these folks aren’t hypocrites at all.

People who support gun control but also want a gun often feel like hypocrites. They aren’t. March for Our Lives, for example, advocates a high standard for gun ownership, with a licensing system comparable to cars, more rigorous background checks and bans on what they call “weapons of war.”

They probably should feel like hypocrites. After all, you can’t keep trying to infringe on someone’s right to own something, call the item evil and vile, call those who support the right to own that something as racist, then suddenly decide you should get a gun without either correcting your thinking or being an outright hypocrite.

Now, not all liberals are hypocrites about guns. There are liberals who actually support the right to keep and bear arms. There aren’t nearly enough of them, but they exist.

Second, if you seem to think there’s more regulation on buying cars than guns, you clearly don’t understand gun laws enough to have a meaningful opinion on the topic.

There are other proposals on their platform that aim to reduce the number of guns owned, and I am not claiming that many members of March for Our Lives wouldn’t prefer the total abolition of gun ownership. The bottom line, though, is that gun owners and prospective gun owners can support all of those goals.

On the other hand, there are many well-documented myths about armed self-defense. Owning a gun makes you more, not less, likely to experience gun violence. The “good guy with a gun” is rarely able to stop the “bad guy with a gun.”

Some people, regardless of their politics, still feel safer with a gun around. “We all know the statistics that guns don’t make us safer,” psychologist Daniel Levitin wrote for the New York Times. “But we fool ourselves into thinking that those statistics don’t apply to us… we reach for guns because if there is a confrontation, we don’t want to be unprepared and we think we will beat the odds.”

Here’s a tip. If you believe all of that; if you believe that guns actually make you less safe, but you want one anyway while also decrying people wanting guns for reasons of personal safety, you’re a hypocrite. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it shakes out.

That’s especially true since pretty much every single study that claims guns make us less safe has been debunked.

Further, you need look no further than to compare the estimated number of times guns are used to save lives compared to the number of times they’re used to threaten life. Take whatever estimate you want and it’ll still be greater than the number of times guns are used in crime.

Yet anti-gunners who suddenly want guns don’t want to look at that. They don’t want to be wrong about guns, yet that doesn’t stop many of them from flocking to gun ownership the moment they feel threatened.

In fact, that’s yet another example of their hypocrisy. They mock us for feeling threatened by random violent crime, then suddenly feel terrorized by people who aren’t issuing threats against them, only to immediately turn to the same guns they derided.

Then again, this is someone who thinks that by buying a gun, you give money to the NRA, so maybe she should step down as the spokesperson for anti-gunners who want to buy guns.

Just a thought.