Despite what you may hear on the news, guns and cars are very different things. One is a machine designed to transport human beings from one place to another in a relatively short amount of time; the other is designed to kill living things in a relatively efficient manner.

But despite these rather basic differences, guns and cars seem unable to avoid being compared to one another in the context of whether one or both of them are dangerous, and whether one or both of them should be regulated. This probably has something to do with the fact that both guns and cars are made out of metal (usually), both are operated by human beings and both are involved in the deaths of many people on a regular basis.

Gun rights advocates like this comparison because it would be patently absurd to ban cars, so why should we ban guns? But Fox host Harris Faulkner took that to a new level today when she said that not only are cars not banned, they’re not regulated at all in the first place. From TalkingPointsMemo‘s account of their segment:

After some back-and-forth among the “Outnumbered” panelists, Falkner returned to Robertson’s point about cars, saying “more people have cars than have guns.” “Are we going to take away everything that people use to kill each other?” Faulkner asked. “Because we’re really going to have to start with the basics, like vehicles.” “Swimming pools!” co-host Andrea Tantaros interjected. “This woman was drunk,” Roginsky said, presumably referring to the suspect in the Oklahoma crash. “We regulate people getting behind the wheel of a car when they’re drunk.” “Yeah, but that’s a substance!” Falkner said. “We’re not regulating the car. We’re regulating the substance.”

At which point someone — thankfully — pointed out that cars are, in fact, regulated. They were immediately accused of not being satisfied “until guns are revoked.”

Even for Fox, this is some impressive argling and bargling. As I wrote earlier this month:

…once you move past that argument [that gun control is meaningless because bad guys will do bad things], you inevitably run up against the claim that guns aren’t actually so bad because cars kill more people every year. And when a drunk driver kills someone, we don’t blame the car; we blame the driver. Which is true! Cars, like guns, are machines that can be super deadly when used improperly. That’s why we’ve found that the state has a compelling interest in making sure that, while almost every adult has the right to buy almost any kind of car they want, there’s an extensive licensing and registration process to make sure that you know what you’re doing.

What’s more, it wouldn’t be all that unreasonable to pass a few more regulations on guns that we already have in place for cars — regulations like mandatory insurance, yearly maintenance inspections and regular licensing renewal.

The irony in all of this is that, by implying that what’s good for cars is good for guns, Faulkner inadvertently made the case for regulating guns. I’ll give you zero guesses as to whether they’ll admit his mistake and concede the point.