In response to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement — which addresses police violence against civilians, among other things — angry conservatives retaliated by creating the pseudo-movement “Blue Lives Matter.” That phrase was meant to imply that people who want to reduce civilian killings by police are trying to get cops killed, and that conservatives are the only ones who are standing up for the boys in blue who keep our streets safe. Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, has run with this line of argument, using it, as well as showy and insincere displays of patriotism, to attack black celebrities who speak out against racism.

It turns out, however, that when given a choice between protecting “blue lives” and defending ridiculously lax gun laws, conservatives will always choose the latter. That was amply demonstrated after Wednesday’s mass shooting in Philadelphia, in which six police officers were injured and two were held hostage during an hours-long standoff with a heavily armed man who was trying to evade arrest on drug charges.

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“The NRA is always talking about the ‘good guys with guns,’ but they rarely mention how often the good guys with guns arm the bad guys with guns,” Stanford law professor John Donohue told Salon last year.