Dear Terribly Misguided

In immediate reaction to the mass-shooting that occurred last night in Lafayette, Louisiana, I tweeted: “Seriously, fuck you if you believe your right to guns outweighs anybody’s right to live their life free from the fear of you and your guns.” And then I went to sleep.

I woke up this morning to just a few replies, thankfully. One of them, which I will quote here, is fairly representative of the opposition to my tweeted position on guns:

“umm no. I don’t trust the government enough to allow them to take our guns. Then we have no way to protect ourselves.”

This was followed by:

“because you know history repeats itself”

I didn’t engage. I thought about it and almost did, mainly because the tweeter seemed earnest, even if terribly misguided, in their position and did not use any profanity or ad hominem attacks. But in the end I just let it go and got on with my life.

Then, a twitter friend replied to this person’s tweet and she came back with this (which is the reason that I wrote this post):

“ugh. You don’t even have a clue. You probably think Sandy Hook was real too. Agree to disagree.” (italics are mine)

That did it. Here is my response to this person and anybody out there who thinks like this:

Dear Terribly Misguided,

The government, this government, controls six separate branches of armed forces, fifty state national guards, a federal police force, and hundreds of thousands of local police forces. It has literally defeated professional armies and entire nations at war. If it wanted you oppressed, imprisoned, or dead for political or other nefarious reasons, you’d be oppressed, imprisoned or dead and there’d be nothing you or any of your pals with your precious guns could do about it. So please, spare us all the Rambo, Patriot bullshit. You’re not important enough for this or any other government to give a shit about.

Secondly, with respect to the idea that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was not real, that it was perpetrated by the government to create the excuse to “take our guns away,” how many mass-shootings (the latest one included) have occurred since Sandy Hook? More than any of us can count. And in that time, not one government agency of any kind has taken away a single gun of any kind from any law-abiding citizen of this country either by statute or by force. Your premise is not only flawed, it’s infantile and ridiculous and so are you.

So please allow me to repeat myself:

Seriously, fuck you if you believe your right to guns outweighs anybody’s right to live their life free from the fear of you and your guns.

Sincerely,

Ray*

*This article was originally published on my Medium and Tumblr blogs and has been very lightly edited to correct grammar and punctuation.