Just when you thought the fearmongering over common sense gun violence legislation couldn't get any more absurd - Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has taken it to a whole new level by comparing the work of Demand an Action and gun safety advocates to Japanese American WWII internment camps.

On April 13th, Rep. Steve Stockman tweeted out the following bizarre statement:

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Sadly, Rep. Stockman is not the only conservative to recently make such absurd comparisons. South Carolina Representative Jeff Duncan recently compared it to the Rwandan genocide - a tragedy that killed an estimated one million people, nearly twenty percent of the entire country's population. Rep. Duncan posted on Facebook:

The 2nd Amendment is (or should be) equal to the 1st Amendment and the 4th Amendment and all of the others. Ask yourselves why it is under attack? Ask yourselves about a National gun registry database and how that might be used and why it is so wanted by progressives.

Read about the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. Read that all Tutsi tribe members were required to register their address with the Hutu government and that this database was used to locate Tutsi for slaughter at the hands of the Hutu. Since the government had the names and addresses of nearly all Tutsis living in Rwanda (remember, each Rwandan had an identity card that labeled them Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa) the killers could go door to door, slaughtering the Tutsis.

The use of hyperbole like this by Representatives Stockman and Duncan to talk about law that will likely save lives is unacceptable. The NRA regularly compares any kind of gun control to the Fascism of Nazi Germany. Yet, more than 90 percent of NRA members support universal background checks.

From Think Progress,

The hysteria over a “national gun registry database” has no basis in current or proposed law, while President Obama has pointed out that the American system of government constrains elected officials from mounting the kind of tyranny the NRA claims they intend. On Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden specifically explained, “There is no place in the federal government where you can go, not a single place, and find out everybody who owns a gun.”

Rather, private gun sellers would be required to do a background check at a federally licensed gun dealers, who have been keeping records for decades without any descent into gun confiscation or genocide.

It seems the only way conservatives can argue against universal background checks is by making outrageously offensive comparisons or comments. It's disgraceful.