Gun control groups have a nasty and annoying habit of ignoring anything that’s inconvenient to their cause. For example, we’ve seen them cite years-old polling numbers simply because the more recent ones showed less support for their pet causes.

It’s far from the only example we’ve seen, either.

Another prime example is pretending that the gun rights side offers absolutely nothing in the wake of mass shootings, that we don’t have any proposed solutions.

These are the people who tried to turn the phrase “thoughts and prayers” into a punchline. In fact, that’s the core of a new gun control commercial that’s making some waves.

An advert pushing for gun control has sparked controversy after targeting people who offer ‘thoughts and prayers’ following shooting incidents.

It is a stab at the gun lobby and is meant to highlight the “the hypocrisy of those who offer thoughts and prayers while going about their daily lives as if nothing had happened”. It was issued jointly by Mothers Against Greg Abbott PAC and Mothers for Democracy to coincide with the 11th anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in which 26 women and children were killed.

‘Thoughts and prayers’ is a common expression often used in response to a mass shooting and is believed by gun control advocates to be a throwaway phrase to cover a lack of action on the country’s ongoing problem with guns. In the one minute clip a young girl is seen sitting at the edge of a pool trying to grab a flamingo floatie before falling into the water.

Then a woman runs to the pool as if to save the girl, but instead she kneels down, clasps her hands, and begins to pray, saying: “Please God, save her. Do something. Save her.” The camera pans out to show the child apparently lifeless, floating in the background, and then people go to the woman and say phrases such as: “My thoughts and prayers are with you.”

A couple is then seen enjoying drinks at the same pool whilst a neighbor mows his lawn as if nothing has happened and shouts out, “thoughts and prayers”. The advert then goes on to say: “The number one killer of children in the United States is not drowning, car wrecks, or cancer. The #1 killer of children in the US is gun violence. Thoughts and prayers are meaningless when you can act.”

And they wonder why we can’t find common ground. It’s an absolute mystery, isn’t it?

I mean, why try to find common ground with people who so blatantly misrepresent what you say and do, then try to pay it for political advantage.

Yes, in the wake of a mass shooting, people offer their thoughts and their prayers because that’s all that can be done in those early hours. Not offering them is a sign that you don’t recognize the horrific loss of life.

Where I have a problem, though, is that people like this believe any action other than passing gun control is, in fact, inaction.

Granted, gun rights advocates haven’t been overly successful pushing some of the agenda items we’d like to see passed in the wake of mass shootings, but that’s not because no one has identified any.

For example, I remember people like this losing their ever-loving minds when we suggested hardening our schools in the wake of Parkland. That argument was bolstered after we learned that the Nashville killer chose the Covenant School instead of her first choice because that other school had tighter security.

In other words, securing our schools deters mass shootings.

Yet they opposed it and now pretend those suggestions never existed.

They seem to forget that we offered up the idea that teachers and staff in our schools should have the option to be armed, if for no other reason than to protect their own lives and then, by extension, they’d protect the lives of students.

All this commercial does is push a lie.

Further, let’s also remember that most of those children being killed–and a lot of those “children” were 16- and 17-year-old criminals–were being shot with illegally possessed firearms, meaning their precious gun control failed to stop those murders.

See, for all the shots fired at “thoughts and prayers” by gun control advocates, they fail to understand that we oppose their preferred policies not out of some desire to see dead people but because those policies simply don’t work. The studies that claim they do are generally garbage and most studies don’t really show they do.

And somehow we’re the jerks for not wanting restrictions on our rights knowing full well that they won’t stop the next mass murder?

We’re simply not going to just accept their demands for an assault weapon ban when we know that the killer would just use handguns the next go-around.

But we also know that most television stations wouldn’t air a rebuttal commercial, either. We could take issue with what this ad says, create our own, and try to pay them to run it and most of them never would.

It’s easy to get away with this nonsense when no one will hear the other side.