“Make the loss of these lives matter,” pleaded actor Matthew McConaughey at a White House press briefing Tuesday. McConaughey is a native of Uvalde, Texas, and he’s famous, so Team Biden brought him in to emotionally beg for more gun control after 19 children and two teachers were brutally murdered at an elementary school in Uvalde.

McConaughey and others are right to be emotionally distraught. When evil assaults innocence, it breaks the heart of anyone who has one.

Everyone wants the lives of those kids to matter, but the shame of it is that leftists want to exploit their deaths in order to take away our God-given constitutional rights.

Now, McConaughey said a lot of good things. “Uvalde is where I learned to master a Daisy BB gun,” he said, adding that he then “graduated to a 410 shotgun” and “was taught to revere the power and the capability of the tool that we call a gun.” Most important, he said, “Uvalde is where I learned responsible gun ownership.” If only that were more true in our culture. His mission, he declared, is “keeping our children safe, because it’s more than our right to do so, it’s our responsibility to do so.”

What happened at Robb Elementary School last month, it goes without saying, was not responsible gun ownership, and authorities clearly failed to keep children safe. Stopping the next mass killer, however, is unlikely to happen even with the seemingly middle-ground proposals McConaughey brought to the table — background checks, red flag laws, and raising the minimum age and adding waiting periods to the purchase of an AR-15.

Each of those things probably has greater public support than other Democrat proposals for outright bans and other restrictions. Yet the bottom line is that murder has always been illegal, while guns have been generally accessible for hundreds of years and Uvalde-type mass killings have only become a problem in the last 25-30 years. Indeed, they’ve greatly increased over just the last two years.

In an Austin American-Statesman op-ed published Monday, McConaughey noted, “I believe that responsible, law-abiding Americans have a Second Amendment right, enshrined by our founders, to bear arms.”

Yet he went on in that op-ed and then in his White House visit to pitch proposals that conflict with this statement. The actor also gave an interview on Fox News where he may have undermined his credibility as a rational compromiser.

He claimed that “this time is different” because there’s “more momentum” for action on guns. “On the Right, there are some things that they’re willing to not staunchly say no to and consider,” he said, “[and] on the Left, they’re willing to say, ‘You know what, we may want the whole loaf, but we’ll take a slice of bread.’” That gives the game away. “Progressives” never stop, and they fundamentally disagree with McConaughey’s op-ed assertion about rights — in this case, by the way, a right that is primarily meant to protect Americans against the very tyrannical government progressives seek.

All of that brings us to another comment McConaughey made at the White House that is quite revealing: “We got to take a sober, humble, and honest look in the mirror.”

McConaughey is famous for acting in Hollywood movies. And Hollywood is famous for movies that glorify “gun violence.” As Mark Alexander put it, “Remarkably, some of the celebs who owe their fame and fortune to their ultra-violent ‘entertainment’ roles are among the most outspoken gun control advocates — a demonstration of unmitigated hypocrisy that falls squarely into the ‘BIG Lie’ category.”

When a Hollywood hypocrite literally took a life with a gun, he blamed everyone else but himself. Nothing stops celebrities from calling for more gun control.

The same hypocrisy can be laid at the collective feet of Hollywood celebrities when it comes to so many other societal ills. Broken homes, fatherless children, drug and alcohol addiction, pornography and the objectification of women, sexual deviancy in the form of “pride,” fomenting racial grievances, promoting vulgar and disrespectful kids — the list goes on. Hollywood celebrities live these things in real life and in most of the roles they play. They routinely produce cultural fifth. And then they sanctimoniously lecture the rest of us about our dirty culture and how things ought to be.

So, yes, Mr. McConaughey, “Take a sober, humble, and honest look in the mirror.”