This month’s terrible attack at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College has renewed calls for more government action to combat gun violence. Public safety activists, noting that Umpqua is yet another in a long line of U.S. mass shootings, are demanding both new federal laws and the return of now-abandoned policies intended to get firearms away from people who shouldn’t have them.

Standing in the way are anti-government zealots, operating under a shadowy organization, who claim their civil liberties are more important than stopping the slaughter of innocents. Though legal scholars affirm the proposed measures wouldn’t violate anyone’s constitutional rights, the zealots’ political power is blocking government efforts to keep Americans safe.

So why won’t lawmakers repudiate the Black Lives Matter movement and adopt aggressive, nationwide stop-and-frisk searches?

Ah, you were probably thinking I was writing about gun control and the National Rifle Association. That’s OK because stop-and-frisk and gun control have much in common. If you support delaying and investigating people who want to buy a gun legally, you should love delaying and investigating people who may be carrying an illegal gun.

Stop-and-frisk is the police practice of detaining and questioning people, subjecting them to a pat-down search if they answer or behave in a manner that raises “reasonable suspicion.” The searches have long been affirmed as constitutional by the courts, highlighted by a 1968 Supreme Court decision by such liberal lions as Earl Warren, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.[1]

The New York City Police Department began using the practice aggressively during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. From 2003 to 2013, NYPD stop-and-frisks discovered 6,939 handguns, 306 rifles, 445 assault weapons, and even 88 machine guns, as well as 50,238 other weapons.[2] New York’s homicide rate had been declining for two decades before Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk expansion, but it fell another 43 percent between 2001, the year before he took office, and 2012, the last year data are available.[3] By comparison, the national rate fell only 16 percent over those years. [4]

Yet early last year, Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, ordered the NYPD to cut back on stop-and-frisk after civil rights leaders charged that it was being used disproportionately against young, minority males. As a result, 2014 stop-and-frisks discovered only 18 percent of the firearms and 15 percent of the other weapons found during the program’s peak year in 2011. De Blasio wasn’t the only leader to order such policy change; other mayors in other cities have also eased up on aggressive policing strategies following 2014’s Black Lives Matter protests.

In the months since those changes, gun violence in America appears to have boomed. There’s not yet enough data to show the increase is real, let alone that it’s fueled by the policy change. But the many anecdotes that gun control advocates cite—the string of weekly mass shootings, the seemingly routine headlines of murder and mayhem—synch with the curtailing of stop-and-frisk and other police practices.

In contrast, there are plenty of data on gun control laws such as mandatory registration, expanded background checks, and prohibiting the carry of firearms in public. Gun control advocates[5] often note those data show that states with more restrictive laws have lower rates of gun-related deaths. But the laws seem to have little effect on murderers and other violent criminals. Simple statistical testing finds little relationship between gun control laws and both murder and violent crime. In fact, the rates of those crimes are often higher when gun laws are stricter, though the different correlations are so small as to be meaningless.[6] More advanced statistical work likewise offers little proof that stricter gun control reduces murder or violent crime. Put another way, there’s about as much evidence that gun control reduces violent crime as there is that stop-and-frisk does.

For civil libertarians, that lack of evidence adds to their skepticism of proposed new gun laws. They are also cynical of broad stop-and-frisk programs, even if reforms were to ensure that different races, age groups and genders would be detained, questioned and searched equally. The anti-government zealots believe that rights to keep and bear arms and be secure against unreasonable searches should take precedent over the cause (if not the actual advancement) of public safety.

But what of people who are all for gun control and hate the NRA, who oppose stop-and-frisk and embrace Black Lives Matter? And what about people with the opposite views? How can they hold that one set of constitutional rights should be constrained in the name of reducing violent crime, but the other shouldn’t? Aren’t such beliefs also zealotry—and a peculiar and troubling form of zealotry at that?

Thomas A. Firey is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a Washington County native.