Nearly two weeks after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting and one thing is clear: the massacre has steered the gun conversation in this country like no other event before it.

The conversation has changed such that the President, long seen as a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, is reportedly flirting with a range of measures including the banning of bump stocks and raising the age required to purchase certain rifles.

And polls show a similar bending of principle in the populous. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed two-thirds of Americans favor stricter gun laws, the highest number ever recorded by the polling agency, and CNN found that number to be 70 percent, the highest since 1993!

Like it or not, a serious debate on guns in this country is coming. And it’s a debate many conservatives are likely to welcome, so long as the political left and it’s media sympathizers come equipped with actual facts rather than the usual assortment of laughable untruths.

In the days since the tragedy in Parkland, leftist anti-gun crusaders have made a habit of showing their asses.

The examples are too numerous to list, but a few of the greatest hits include:

– George Takei’s claim that the NRA “sells” guns. As anyone even remotely familiar with the gun debate knows, the NRA isn’t a firearm vendor, but rather advocates on behalf of gun owners and gun manufacturers. Takei’s claim was liked and retweeted thousands of times, poisoning an already toxic conversation with yet another blatant lie.

– Unhinged Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe’s claim that an AR-15 can fire up to 8 rounds per second; because the AR-15 is a semiautomatic rifle, it would take one hell of a trigger finger to pull that off. In other words, it’s impossible.

– Famed novelist and all around liberal weirdo Joyce Carol Oates, who bemoaned the power of the shooter Nikolas Cruz’s “AK-15.” Enough said.

But by far the most heinous abuser of facts in the aftermath of the shooting has been David Hogg, a student at the very school Cruz so savagely terrorized. While I hate to pile on an actual victim, Hogg has used his newfound platform, donated graciously by countless mainstream media outlets, to parrot bogus anti-gun talking points, such as the idea that the NRA and its spokeswoman Dana Loesch “own” Congress.

The suggestion, largely unchallenged by sympathetic pundits, is blatantly false; in 2016 the organization ranked 488th in political contributions and 154th in lobbying.

Hogg has even gone so far as to call for the boycotting of companies who offer deals to NRA members and used the shooting to call for furthering STEM education and clean energy, proving once and for all that he is indeed a social justice Frankenstein created by George Soros in the laboratory of his Hungarian lair.

Hogg’s father is a retired FBI agent, and given Trump’s recent quarrels with the organization it’s obvious the kid is being used as a political pawn (such puppetry raises obvious questions about his parents’ fitness to maintain guardianship).

But at 17, Hogg should have some understanding of the consequences of his dishonesty.

Of course, the leftist media have been all too complicit in the misinformation campaign, parading Hogg and like-minded activists in front of cameras to blame the NRA rather than a corrupt sheriff who ignored countless warning signs in the name of political correctness and pledged that if elected he would “measure the success of the agency by the amount of young people we keep out of jail.”

Yikes! I can think of one kid he might have broken that pledge for.

The lies pile up, and any attempt to correct the record is met with “the blood of schoolchildren is on your hands.”

If the left’s knowledge of guns and gun laws matched its passion for gun control, an actual gun control debate may be possible. Instead we get unfiltered emotion and absurd falsehoods.

This makes taking the left seriously difficult for ordinary Americans, who grasp that liberals’ understanding of the issue(s) is equivalent to a five-year-old’s understanding of particle physics.

It’s gotten so bad that even some on the left are pleading with their political similars to educate themselves.

Bill Maher has called out his fellow leftists for their ignorance, and liberal gun enthusiast Yishan Wong used the Huffington Post to admit:

“Almost every gun control advocate I know hates guns and wants nothing to do with them. They are vaguely (or very) afraid of them, and believe that if they fire a gun or buy one, they will suddenly become a gun nut or turn evil.

That is nonsense. You need to understand guns intimately if you want to regulate them.”

It’s a welcome development, but don’t expect the rest of the left to follow suit anytime soon; they know good and well that a fact-based debate on guns is a debate they simply cannot win.