If you debate many gun control fans, they often claim that they don’t want to take away your guns. They’ll say they just want to enact some “common sense” gun reforms.

Yet, when you prod a bit, you’ll find out that there are really no pro-gun policies they support. They want to make it virtually impossible for you to get a gun. Then, once you get one, they want you to be restricted to, at most, the gun range and hunting.

They can’t acknowledge that armed citizens are good things.

After a video of law enforcement officers acting like utter cowards at the Uvalde school shooting was released, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., claimed that the incident “puts to bed, forever, the question of whether the way to deal with bad guys with guns is to make sure there are more good guys with guns.”

Well, “forever” ended this weekend, when a 22-year-old fatally shot a man armed with an AR-15 who had opened fire in a mall food court in Greenwood, Indiana, killing three. We don’t know all the specifics — and we’ll never know how many lives the Good Samaritan saved — but it is clear Murphy’s assertion was incorrect on two counts: Cops who stand around while children are being slaughtered aren’t “good guys,” but real good guys with guns do exist.

Gun controllers assure us they don’t oppose the Second Amendment, they merely want to pass “common sense” gun laws that take “weapons of war” out of the hands of bad guys. Yet their policy proposals and rhetoric tell us something very different. Anti-gun zealots are so singularly focused on guns, they refuse to even acknowledge that the right to personal self-defense exists. Indeed, they can’t even concede that a person carrying a gun legally (as, it seems, the hero in Indiana did) or obtaining a concealed-carry license — and these people are less likely to engage in criminality than cops — might serve a positive use, like mitigating the tragedy of a mall shooting.

If you think I exaggerate, here is Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, noting that, “when a 22-year-old illegally brings a loaded gun into a mall and kills a mass shooter armed with an AR-15 after he already killed three people and wounded others is not a ringing endorsement of our implementation of the Second Amendment.”

Of course, it appears that in Indiana, a mall declaring itself a gun-free zone doesn’t have the force of law, so he wasn’t doing anything illegal.

Author David Harsanyi, though, is absolutely right about how this is framed by the anti-gun left. At no point can they admit that maybe they were wrong. Instead, they’re grasping at straws.

Watts wasn’t the only person who took a tone that strongly suggests they prefer more dead bodies than dead bad guys. Multiple people have made similar statements, all predicated on this warped idea that the armed citizen was somehow in the wrong.

Now, I get that more dead bodies are good for the gun control side, but you’d think they’d be a little more circumspect about their disappointment.

Instead, they’re openly voicing concern that a good guy with a gun was on the scene and willing to run toward the sound of gunfire in hopes that he might save innocent lives.

Honestly, if you needed a reason to stop taking the gun control jihadists seriously, this is it.