And in a recent congressional hearing on the assassination attempt--one meant to look at the Secret Service failures that day--Democrats seized on the opportunity to try and push their favorite assassination attempt narrative, that somehow gun control would have prevented it.

And Republicans were less than pleased.

Republicans who attended the hearing attacked their Democratic colleagues’ priorities in comments to The Daily Signal. 

“The Democrats never miss an opportunity to push for gun control,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal. “Give them any episode that happens and they’re going to push for gun control. We have the Second Amendment for a reason, and it has to be protected.” 

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said the gun control topic belongs in “a separate hearing.” 

“There are a lot of different things that we could do to reduce gun violence in this country, but this is a hearing about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump,” she told The Daily Signal. 

Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, accused Democrats of wanting to “jump on” the gun issue after avoiding “responsible legislation” on guns in Congress for several years. “The bottom line is … that we have to pass something for changes to be made.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said members of Congress should be “focused on trying to get answers” about the Trump rally shooting. 

“But frankly,” he added, Cheatle is “not giving us any answers.”

Of course, there's this whole decorum thing that members of Congress are, at least hypothetically, supposed to adhere to.

I, however, can say pretty much whatever's on my mind, and it infuriates me that they're going this route.

We have absolutely no legitimate reason to believe that if the shooter hadn't been able to steal an AR-15 from his father then he wouldn't have been able to access any other firearm. A bolt-action rifle, for example, would survive literally every other ban currently under consideration anywhere in the nation. Bolt-actions tend to be more accurate, as a general thing, than semi-automatics. As it was, this dipstick missed killing Trump by mere inches and then mostly because Trump turned at the last second. With a bolt action, we might be having a very different discussion.

Yet one of the prevailing narratives is the need for an assault weapon ban. 

This has nothing to do with the attempt on Trump's life. It never did. The assassination attempt is nothing but a pretext for all the things they wanted to do all along. They're hoping they can get enough Republican voters to turn anti-gun that they might be able to get something done when they haven't before.

That's it.

I personally believe that most of these members of Congress are secretly upset that the bullet didn't hit a little more to the right. They have enough sense not to say it out loud, but I've seen nothing from them that suggests they actually care about Trump's well-being.

So it makes their calls for gun control amid "concern" for what happened ring a little shallow, especially considering how many of them have engaged in the kind of rhetoric that demonizes their opponents and makes them appear to be sub-human and thus potentially worth killing.

The fact that they're trying to latch onto an assassination attempt that they probably wish succeeded in order to push their agenda is beyond disgusting. Republican members of Congress had harsh words for it, too.

The problem is that they're not nearly harsh enough.