Invoking assassinated reformers to back gun policies is a shameless rhetorical irony.

Evidence

To use President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.—whose reform efforts were silenced when they were shot to death—to vindicate the problematic policies and practices of the gun industry is not only the height of irony. It is shameless. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1087

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the darkest version of comparative ennoblement — borrowing moral authority from people whose death at gunpoint is the starkest possible counter-evidence.
• SHARE: The KKK’s similar co-opting of MLK after his death is a parallel worth noting to someone following civil-rights historiography.