In a stunning attempt to shift blame for Sunday’s deadly shooting at a Waffle House in Tennessee away from the mentally unstable criminal who perpetrated the crime, on Monday, an MSNBC panel claimed that gun he used, an AR-15 rifle, was the “real criminal” and that America’s pro-gun culture was also responsible for the killings.

“What is your message, I guess I want to ask, to those who say, ‘Don’t touch my guns no matter what’?,” anchor Stephanie Ruhle fretted to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens early in the 9:00 a.m. ET hour. Seizing on the opportunity to immediately exploit the tragedy to push the gun control agenda, Stephens proclaimed: “Well, that’s exactly it. The problem that we have is that we have not just a legal regime, but a culture in which the way in which guns are treated as sort of ordinary household implements is precisely what leads to the deaths of the sort we just saw in Waffle House.”

The faux conservative op/ed writer, who recently called for the repeal of the Second Amendment, reiterated: “But this, again, the central problem that we have here is that we have too many guns in this country and people who don’t think that they are dangerous....it’s also a kind of a failure of culture...”

Minutes later, left-wing Princeton professor and frequent MSNBC pundit Eddie Glaude, chimed in by falsely claiming that shooter Travis Reinking’s choice of firearm allowed him to kill more people:

An AR-15, four people are dead. And the quickness with which that happened is important....I think it’s important for us to say this, that if he [the shooter] didn’t have an AR-15, right, he wouldn’t have been able to kill four people so quickly, in my view. If he didn’t have an AR-15, right, the opportunity to kill even – to cause even more carnage may not have even been possible.

In reality, Reinking could have shot just as many people just as quickly with a semiautomatic pistol.

Glaude proceeded with his fact-free rant by actually blaming the inanimate object itself for the murders:

We want to understand it. This case crystalizes for us everything we find wrong with the current gun control debate, right? And we can say here, we can sit here and say that [shooter Travis] Reinking was mentally unstable or is mentally unstable. We can say that. And we can let people make – draw their conclusions between kind of mental health issues and gun violence. But we don’t want to do that, what we want to say is that there was an AR-15, a weapon of mass destruction, in a Waffle House....the real criminal here is that AR-15.

The glaring ignorance of basic facts about guns was only dwarfed by that seeming call for the prosecution of a firearm. It’s just another day on MSNBC.

Here is a transcript of portions of the April 23 exchange: