On March 4 Breitbart News reported on Gabby Giffords’ renewed push to extend background checks to gun shows so that everyone has to pass the same background check her attacker passed. Media outlets and gun control proponents went apoplectic, exposing the fact that they had assumed Giffords would be able to push background checks as a solution to “violence” without her claims being scrutinized.

In other words, Giffords is their human shield — the gun control representative who could do and say what she wanted without facing any real pressure to prove her claims were true.

But BN showed that her claims that background checks are a way of “stopping violence” can’t even survive Giffords’ personal experience. After all, her attacker, Jared Loughner, passed a background check to acquire the gun with which he attacked her in January 2011.

After BN reported this, the NRA tweeted the story and media and gun controllers lost it. Slate, MSNBC, Daily Mail, Huffington Post UK, Tucson Weekly, Mother Jones, Blue Nation Review, Daily Kos, Chicago Sun Times, The Hill, New York Daily News, San Francisco Sentinel, Inquistr, and others were aghast that Breitbart News actually tested Giffords’ claims.

But no one displayed the conviction that Giffords’ views were above criticism quite as well as MSNBC’s Al Sharpton. On March 6 he asked: “How can the NRA tweet anything like this about Giffords after all that she went through?”

In other words, Giffords is their human shield.

Gun control proponents know background checks don’t stop high profile gun-related crimes — just as they didn’t stop Jerad and Amanda Miller (Las Vegas), Elliot Rodger (Santa Barbara), Ivan Lopez (Fort Hood 2009), Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), James Holmes (Aurora theater), Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood 2009), and numerous other high profile attackers who passed background checks to acquire their guns. Yet background checks continue to be pushed because they represent another way to control law-abiding gun owners.

Giffords was supposed to stand with Democrats and push for their passage as one whose ideas could not be criticized, mush less assailed.

Here’s the problem — background checks don’t work, and Giffords’ attacker is living proof of that.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.