Senator Ron Johnson went on ABC this weekend to talk about the Iran situation, and somewhere between Martha Raddatz’s predictable doom-and-gloom questions about the ceasefire, he dropped the single most devastating argument against gun control that anyone has made on network television in years. Just casually. Like he was ordering a sandwich.

Raddatz’s face was absolutely priceless. You could practically hear the producers screaming in her earpiece: “CHANGE THE SUBJECT! CHANGE THE SUBJECT!”

Here’s what Johnson said, and we’re quoting it directly because it deserves to be carved into marble somewhere: “They are brutal, by the way, this is exactly what nationwide gun control results in. The Iranian people are completely disarmed. It’s going to be very difficult for them to rise up.”

That’s it. That’s the whole argument. Forty-seven years of theocratic brutality, distilled into two sentences that every gun-grabbing Democrat in Washington should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids.

Because here’s what Iran actually looks like when a government disarms its people. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has 200,000 troops. The Basij militia — basically the regime’s neighborhood snitch force that beats women for showing their hair — has another 600,000. That’s 800,000 armed enforcers keeping 88 million unarmed civilians in line. The Iranian people can’t fight back because they literally have nothing to fight back with.

Every time some Democrat from Connecticut or California gets on a podium and lectures us about how “nobody needs an AR-15,” remember Iran. Remember what a disarmed population actually looks like. It looks like morality police dragging a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini to her death for wearing her hijab wrong. It looks like snipers on rooftops shooting teenage protesters in 2022. It looks like 47 years of a regime that answers to nobody because the people it rules over have been stripped of the one thing that could make the mullahs think twice.

But sure, Dianne Feinstein’s ghost wants your shotgun. For safety.

The beautiful thing about what Johnson did is that he didn’t even try to make a Second Amendment argument. He didn’t quote the Founders. He didn’t cite case law. He just pointed at a real country, in real time, that we’ve all been watching on the news for weeks, and said: “That. That’s what gun control gets you.” No theory. No hypotheticals. Just 88 million people living proof.

And he did it on ABC, which is roughly as friendly to gun rights arguments as a vegan restaurant is to a guy carrying a rack of ribs. Raddatz tried to steer back to diplomacy, but the damage was done. The clip went viral before the interview was even over.

Now, we already know how the Left is going to respond to this. They’re going to say “America isn’t Iran” — which is true, and that’s exactly the point. America isn’t Iran because we have the Second Amendment. We’re not Iran because the Founders looked at every tyrannical government in human history and said, “Yeah, we’re going to make sure the citizens can shoot back.” That’s the whole ballgame.

They’ll also trot out the usual European comparisons. “Well, Australia banned guns and they’re fine!” Great. Australia also doesn’t share a border with a cartel narco-state, doesn’t have 330 million people spread across a continent-sized landmass, and frankly, has never had to fight a revolution against the most powerful military on earth. We have. We won. And we wrote down exactly how we did it so that no government — including our own — could ever pull an Iran on us.

(Also, have you seen what Australia did to its own citizens during COVID? Locked them in their homes, arrested people for posting on Facebook, built actual quarantine camps. Maybe not the flex the Left thinks it is.)

The timing of Johnson’s argument is perfect because we just spent the last several weeks watching Trump negotiate from a position of strength with Iran. We parked the Navy on their doorstep. We got a ceasefire 90 minutes before the deadline. And the whole time, the Iranian people — the ones who actually hate the regime even more than we do — couldn’t do a single thing to help themselves because their government took their guns 47 years ago and never gave them back.

That’s not ancient history. That’s today’s news. And Ron Johnson connected those dots on national television while Martha Raddatz sat there blinking.

So the next time your liberal cousin at Thanksgiving starts lecturing you about “common-sense gun reform,” just ask them one question: How’s that working out for the people of Iran? Then watch them change the subject faster than Raddatz did.