Leading off Tuesday’s Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews seemed to insinuate a comparison between pro-gun advocates and the communist North Vietnam in a segment about gun control in the wake of Sunday night’s Las Vegas shooting.

All the while, Matthews’s two assembled guests/so-called journalists mocked certain gun owners and bewailed the “gun culture” in America that they wished was the opposite.

Matthews made the Vietnamese claim while speaking to The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and USA Today senior political correspondent Heidi Przybyla about how he “love[s] parallels” in politics.

With that in mind, he let loose:

You know, we couldn’t win in Vietnam because we were going the stay — they were going to stay there, and we’re going to come home...The people who are for gun control get interested in something for a while, but the gun owners stay with it. They never leave it. They’re the home team, and they’re never going to let people touch their guns.

Both guests saw no problem with that insulting assertion as Robinson noted how both gun owners and “they” (aka the Vietnamese) “always have the edge on intensity on that image” before pivoting back to Second Amendment supporters.

“And that has been the case for years and years and years, and is certainly the case now. And looking at the national level, the federal level, this Congress and this President, it’s — I wish I could work myself up into thinking that something would happen, but I can’t. I can’t,” he fretted.

Going to Przybyla, Matthews complained that “once you get west of New York state, in fact, better stay down in the city part of New York, the suburban part, you run into gun country” plus from Allentown, Pennsylvania “all the way out to Goddamn Wyoming.”

“Anywhere you are, it’s all gun country, except maybe Chicago and there they’ve got their own gun problem with the gangs. But you can’t be a senator from one of those states, Democrat or Republican, and get serious about gun control. It doesn’t work,” Matthews added.

Showing no difference between herself and gun control activist Shannon Watts, Przybyla lashed out:

But what’s happened to gun culture over the past 10 to 30 years. We’ve gone from just your traditional bolt action pistols that people use for hunting, but that wasn’t going to last forever. And the NRA knew that. They knew that hunting culture is decreasing. So they start pushing these semi-automatic weapons and pump out the fear and the paranoia, as well, that — first of all, convincing people that they need the semi-automatics to defend themselves, that these pistols are not going to do the trick. You need these — these street weapons, these war weapons to defend yourself.

Next, Matthews and Robinson conveniently ignored the fact that machine guns are illegal in order for the former to quip: “[I]f somebody’s knocking on your window and trying to get in your house, you go find the machine gun.”

Meanwhile, Przybyla kept pushing rhetoric akin to Democratic talking points:

They say there’s nothing that you can do because if — these people are evil. And they want to get the guns, they’re going to get them. But they completely dismiss when confronted with any of the facts that this is a unique problem in our country. So either there’s something wrong with our laws, or we have a unique high number of evil people in our country.

What’s truly outrageous was how the trio employed Jimmy Kimmel’s false mindset that the NRA has somehow been paying off members of Congress and rules Washington with an iron fist. In reality, it’s the NRA’s millions of members that actually make the difference at the ballot box.

“NRA takes an absolutist position and the NRA is still one of the powerful lobbies in the town,” Robinson argued.

The pair ended the segment by using Pat Robertson as a strawman for the right after Robertson told his 700 Club viewers that the Las Vegas shooting was punishment for our collective disrespect of President Trump.

“When you don’t have the facts on your side, you make it about culture of the other side,” Przybyla argued, which is interesting seeing as how she didn’t seem to have a grasp of the facts either.

This anti-gun tirade was bought and paid for by Hardball advertisers Capital One and Oprah’s O, That’s Good soup.

Here’s the relevant transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on October 3: