AN OPEN LETTER TO CLOSED MINDS

Dear Gunhuggers of America:

You know that thing you've been doing for the last week and a half now, where you question the motives of the Florida high-school students who have been demanding political change after their classmates were shot before their very eyes? Sometimes you insist they are members of a strolling company of "crisis actors," sometimes you say they are pawns of evil puppetmaster George Soros and "socialist" legislators, sometimes you zero in on their personal lives. The other morning I heard one of you raising suspicions because some of the kids were caught laughing on video instead of expressing emotions he felt would be more appropriate.

Keep all that up. No, really. It's pure gold.

Because the more you do this, the more you reveal your true morals. What you really value more than life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.  Keep it up long enough, and maybe, just maybe, the rest of the country will finally catch on to what you're really all about.

Keep up those personal attacks on children who have just witnessed a horror that, I am guessing, you have no more experience with than I do. The kind of unspeakable tragedy that is likely to shape the rest of their lives, at an age when EVERYTHING they encounter is already magnified a thousand times (and in a climate where they will be hounded by TV cameras not just for the next month but every damn time ANOTHER mass shooting occurs). Many of them speak of watching their best friends murdered a few feet away from them. That's the kind of trauma we typically only associate with the nightmares of war—only soldiers have at least had the benefit of training for such a situation and knowing every day that they might face it. But sure, you just go right ahead abstracting and intellectualizing their shock, grief, mourning, and rage.

And remember to continue challenging their legitimacy on the basis of their age. Act as if they have no right to speak up, because they don't know enough about the harsh realities of life to weigh in on a subject the rest of us have the luxury of incorporating into our binge TV schedule. What do THEY know about what it's like to have your entire world turned upside down by an event entirely out of your control before you can even legally buy beer?

By all means, bully them—in person, over the airwaves, and online. They need it if they're ever going to man up! Help them grow a pair! Bullying is all the rage these days; why, you clearly believe in its effectiveness so much that you elected the biggest bully in the schoolyard to be our president.

Speaking of THAT guy, the rest of the America, if not the entire world, is looking at this spectacle and wondering why so many 17-year-olds from a random high school in small-town Florida sound so much more articulate, intelligent, and eloquent than the 71-year-old alleged business whiz who is now the leader of the free world. But YOUR reading of the situation is: obviously these kids are actors, they've been coached (while grieving an almost unfathomable loss, no less), and they simply don't know as much about life as a big-city billionaire who has had every opportunity handed to him since birth.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of your personal attacks on these kids you have never met and had never heard of, let alone cared about, until The New Valentine's Day Massacre is that it lays bare a fundamental truth: Your theoretical personal right to buy and bear arms (of any kind you choose) matters more to you that the real-world consequences of your selfishness in other people's lives. You have spent decades and lobbyists have spent millions demanding guns at your bedside and concealed weapons when you leave your home so that you can protect your loved ones (yes, I have been listening, and, to quote the president's crib notes, "I hear you"). And yet when someone else's loved ones are massacred, your first instinct is to blame the victims. (And yes, as much as you both hate this term  and love to usurp it, THEY ARE THE VICTIMS HERE. Hate to break it to you, but in this case, as in so many others you love to opine about, YOU AREN'T.)

It sounds to me like your right to maintain a well-armed personal militia is more important to you than any other freedom you possess as an American. It appears that your precious guns are SO central to your life that, when confronted with an endless parade of cases where they have caused far more harm than good, your kneejerk response is: WE NEED EVEN MORE GUNS. In fact, our president just said as much during an address to his fellow Regressives this very morning.

And if that is the case, it seems to me that we may have very, very different ideas of what human life is all about. Of what America "means" to us. You seem to think we live in the (movie version of the) Wild West, and/or a Bruce Willis film.

That sounds like a delusion to me, not patriotism. I'm tempted to say it sounds like mental illness, but then some of you have recently conceded that maybe mentally ill people should not be able to purchase certain weapons, and I KNOW you would NEVER see yourself in THAT category, because it's so easy for anyone (i.e., you) to tell the  "good guys" from the "bad" ones (just look for the white hats, par'dner!), and the "crazies" from the 'normals" (just look for the arm tattoos or patches on the shirt sleeves!). But I'm a little nervous myself. How do I know your outrage over those damn crisis actors won't drive you to shoot up a gun store that wouldn't sell you your next cold metal sex toy? Or take aim at little old gunless me?

In summary, you guys are doing a fantastic job of making a case for stricter gun laws, because the more you talk, the more you show your true faces to the rest of the world. And those faces are pretty damned scary, if you ask me.

Hands up, don't shoot (me),
Uncle Ron

PS. One last tip: Now that some of you gunhugging elected officials, after being harrrassed by those meddling kids, are finally talking about miniscule changes to legislation, be sure to keep any potential laws as narrow as you possibly can. Pick a single technicality that happened to play a role in the most recent heavily publicized incident—ban bump stocks! raise the age limit to purchase an assault rifle by two years!—and act like it's the key to solving the problem, instead of a relative minor factor. Focus the conversation THERE, and keep insisting that ALL your political opponents secretly want to ban ALL guns, with NO MIDDLE GROUND. Trick us into framing this as an all-or-nothing scenario, and slowly whittle away at the individual trees until the forest has been clear-cut. After all, that has worked quite well in your parallel attacks on women's reproductive rights, universal health care, government regulations on shady business practices, non-heterosexual marriage, the legalization of cannabis, and so very many other issues. Because, as you and I both know, the "mainstream media" AND the Left these days are more than willing to take that bait. Good luck, guys, and I look forward to seeing you again on Fox News after the NEXT national tragedy.