It’s coming up on the one-year anniversary of the El Paso shooting. That means it’s time for the obligatory moment when someone tries to use the bodies of the slain as a soapbox once again to push gun control.

This year, we have a United States Representative who has opted to be among the first to engage in the morbid and disgusting ritual.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar stressed the need for government action against gun violence as El Paso approaches the one-year anniversary of the Walmart mass shooting.

“This is not a controversial issue,” the El Paso Democrat said Monday during a press call with the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. “The vast majority of Americans believe you should be able to walk into a Walmart without fearing that you, too, will be taken down by a semiautomatic weapon. America is better than this.”

Sure. Everyone does believe you should be able to walk into Walmart without fear of getting shot.

I should be able to walk into Walmart without fear of seeing someone the size of a humpback whale wearing yoga pants, too, but that ain’t happening either.

The truth of the matter is that violence can find you anywhere and everywhere, and almost none of it is somewhere you should expect to get shot. That’s because the evil beings–I can’t quite work up the nerve to call them “people” right now–that carry out these attacks don’t want to go where people expect to get shot. They pick their targets because you should expect to feel safe.

The problem is, perfect safety doesn’t exist.

But that’s not an excuse in Escobar’s mind.

Escobar urged the Senate and the White House to act on gun control legislation, naming H.R. 8, a bill that would require background checks for firearms sales.

The bill, known as the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, seeks new background check requirements for firearm transfers between private parties. It would prohibit a firearm transfer between private parties unless a licensed gun dealer, manufacturer or importer first takes possession of the firearm to conduct a background check.

Which wouldn’t do a thing to prevent this kind of tragedy. Nothing at all.

You see, the police at the time noted that the shooter bought his weapon legally. A recent report on additional charges notes he bought it off the internet. For both of those to be correct, the killer would have had to have had it shipped to a licensed gun dealer and undergone a NICS check.

That’s the exact same background check Escobar is trying to use El Paso to push as a requirement for everyone.

The problem is that these killers are generally able to pass those background checks. They often shouldn’t be–there’s often a history of domestic violence with these creatures–but they can and do.

What’s more, Escobar should know this. She should know both how he got the gun and that he passed the background check. She knows this and still pushes this disingenuous nonsense.

Then again, for anti-gun lawmakers, mass shootings are just a pretext to push for various measures. Those measures don’t really have to have anything to do with what happened. They’re just banking on most people being too ill-informed to realize it.