In a jaw-dropping segment of callousness, Fox News trotted out contributor Jonah Goldberg to attack Vice President Joe Biden’s statement about his task force looking to curb gun violence, “Even if what we do only saves one life, it makes sense.” 

Host Mike Jerrick introduced the segment on Fox & Friends this morning by saying, “It doesn’t make sense to our next guest.” Jerrick gave Goldberg an extra boost of credibility by saying, “He says using this kind of rhetoric actually puts politics ahead of what’s going on and what is best for the country.”

Jerrick and co-host Tucker Carlson listened credulously as Goldberg said:

The problem is, it’s just flatly not true. And it’s a kind of rhetorical bullying… If you disagree with Joe Biden about saving even one kid’s life, it’s worth it, then it automatically puts you in the defensive position of being pro dead kid which, you know, is completely unfair.

And the simple reality is that if we had a standard that any law was justified if it saved just one life, then we would ban cars, we would ban plastic buckets because somewhere between 10 and 40 little kids a year drown in their backyards in plastic buckets. We would ban ladders, we would ban, you know, virtually every household appliance. We would basically handcuff every everybody in America to their radiators. ‘Cause that would definitely save at least one life. And this approach to things is a – basically, it’s a way to give an absolutely unlimited warrant to government actions without having any significant standard for what the results of that government action will be.

Well, talk about faulty logic. For one thing, nobody in the Obama administration is talking about banning guns. They may be talking about banning certain kinds of guns – the same way, say, cars without seat belts are banned. In this case, Obama is considering banning some semi-automatic weapons. And there’s another difference, semi-automatic weapons are hardly analogous to plastic buckets. The vast majority of usage of plastic buckets, ladders and even cars is innocuous, not harmful. The sole purpose of guns, on the other hand, is to kill or injure. Thirdly, there’s plenty of regulations and restrictions on cars to make them safer.

But, predictably, neither of the two hosts challenged a thing Goldberg said. Carlson went on to suggest that people were too focused on saving people by regulating guns instead of looking at the supposed danger of regulation: “Why is there so little discussion of the costs of government action?”

That was pretty much Goldberg’s point, that saving lives via gun regulation is just not worth the “cost.”

All regulation has to have some kind of cost/benefit analysis. Right? We know we would save thousands of lives if we made the speed limit five miles an hour. But at the same time, the loss to the economy of making the speed limit five miles an hour would make a lot of people poorer. And it’s just not worth it. It’s also a deep infringement of our freedom. And so the problem with this standard of if it saves just one life, it’s worth it, means excluding all other considerations.

That begs the question, how many dead children would be “worth it?” But, of course, neither host asked.