php - CodeIgniter Call to a member function get_where() on a non-object

Im super new to codeigniter and am trying to figure out how to use the Models, ive used a MVP framework before but it was a bit different. I have the users controller, which initializes the model(I think I did it right), then the model has a function, that gets a row by email.

The controller looks like:

class Users extends CI_Controller{
    public function login(){

        $this->load->model('users_model');

        $this->users_model->login('slavigne@uark.edu', 'abcdefg');

        $this->load->view('templates/header');
        $this->load->view('users/login');
        $this->load->view('templates/footer');
    }
}

and the model looks like:

class users_model extends CI_Model{
    public function users_model(){
            parent::__construct();
    }

    public function login($email, $password){
        $query = $this->db->get_where('users', array('email' => $email));

        return $query->result();
    }
}

The problem im getting is:

Call to a member function get_where() on a non-object

which I understand means that db isn't an object, but all the code I saw for models, say that this should work. Any help or advice would be great! Also any advice on newbie mistakes to codeigniter would be nice!