Gun Control and Never Again; My open letter to set this straight (trigger warning)

My dear wife believes that social media is making me too much of a negative person. She may be right. But I have to tell you, I have seen some of the ugliest and foulest things this year than I have seen in many years beforehand. And I’ve seen death up close and personal. It takes a lot to make me think things are more heinous than death. But in my point of view, that’s exactly what this is.

Children. They’re children. At the end of the day, compared to the rest of us who are supposed to be adults, they are children. Not only that, this is about children and their freedom of speech (1^st Amendment) versus the right to bear arms (2^nd Amendment) and how far people are willing to go to silence them.

I have never seen any portion of the Constitution that people are so willing to kill or die for than the right to bear arms. Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists. You would think it’s holier than Jesus Christ himself and the slightest breath that only appears to be a threat to it must be silenced forever. The threat need not be confirmed by any form of actual logic. Imagined is more than enough to set some of you off. You can tell me it isn’t true but you’ll never prove it so long as thousands of internet comments say things like:

“Go kill yourself”

“You’ll pry my gun from my cold dead fingers”

“Come and get my guns, I hope you’re bullet proof”

“When you come for MY guns, you’re dead”

And the real whoppers:

“These kids need to go kill themselves”

“Someone needs to teach them what real guns mean”

“They need to shut up because we are about to not give a shit anymore”

That’s how we react to the concerns of these teens who recently survived ground zero of a massacre. Isn’t it easy to be armchair quarterbacks spouting venom at people who just finished burying a friend. A friend I would add who probably bled all over them. A friend they saw die. Yes, because the 2^nd amendment is the holiest of holy things and it doesn’t matter if you saw a child’s head chopped off and had it tossed in your lap, you have no right to talk about it. Yes, it’s so easy to tell them to shup up about your rights because that’s all that really matters here. Because you didn’t have to be there. You didn’t have to wipe the brains off the wall. How nice for you.

I swear I have never seen any class of people so morbidly desperate to silence any other. Desperate to the point of photoshopping or searching for dirt to discredit. To name calling and threats. It’s these acts of hate that make me want to puke up my heart. I find them that sickening. And that’s for all you smug people out there who have doing exactly these things and making disgusting claims that don’t change a single thing about the fact that children are dead. And all because of one simple thing you don’t understand.

You clearly don’t have the first damn clue about what it actually takes to change an amendment. Allow me to quote the “Constitutional Amendment Process” from the National Archives as follows in paragraph 2:

The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. None of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention. The Congress proposes an amendment in the form of a joint resolution. Since the President does not have a constitutional role in the amendment process, the joint resolution does not go to the White House for signature or approval. The original document is forwarded directly to NARA's Office of the Federal Register (OFR) for processing and publication. The OFR adds legislative history notes to the joint resolution and publishes it in slip law format. The OFR also assembles an information package for the States which includes formal "red-line" copies of the joint resolution, copies of the joint resolution in slip law format, and the statutory procedure for ratification under 1 U.S.C. 106b.

This means you cannot just waltz in to some government building and rewrite the Constitution. Hell, even the President can’t do that. This requires a massive process and vote and guess what; there is no vote active for changing the Second Amendment. None. Zero. Zilch. Let me put that another way:

THERE’S NOTHING THERE!!!

No. The only changes that are possible are state by state restrictions that don’t infringe on the second amendment in any way.

Here’s another tidbit you seem to lose in translation. The right to bear arms says only that you have that right. It does not say what those “arms” have to be. That’s why you aren’t allowed to have a 50 calibur machine gun. That’s why you aren’t allowed to have fully automatic weapons. That’s why the AR15 can be brought under scrutiny and banned if the majority of American’s want it that way. Not having the exact kind of gun you personally want, does not mean your rights have been trod upon. You can still buy a gun, but when people take to altering and abusing one form of gun over all others, it’s going to get scrutinized. The same thing happened back in 1988 when Maryland banned a 22 calibur lovingly called the Saturday Night Special because it had become a number one murder weapon and was deemed too easy to conceal.  The AR15 is the number one abused weapon utilized in mass shootings. That seems important. Losing it will not mean the loss of all your guns, no matter what you think. For that matter, it’s already nearly banned in Florida via a new law just passed.

Finally, one more thing you don’t seem to understand and that’s the definition of the word AMENDMENT. It’s an amendment meaning that it was added or changed after the fact. By it’s very definition it can be legally changed again. If not, there would not be a process to do so. That process would not exist. But it does exist and you are actively pushing people to do everything in their power to pursue it.

While most gun zealots have stomped away from this in seething fury by now, there is still more to say. If you are still here, maybe there’s hope. But I’m not done. Now that I’ve explained the truth of an amendment, I’m going to call out some more of the sick behavior that I’ve seen adults utilize on these kids. I’m talking about the most ridiculous tropes I’ve ever seen.

First of all, if I see one more person compare gun control to abortion I’m going to summon a demon of hell to burn down a gun store. The two have zero to do with each other no matter what bizarre line of imaginary logic you concoct. Someone said Planned Parenthood donated funds to the Never Again movement. That doesn’t make the connection either. Speaking of money. I’m going to point out this doesn’t change the fact that children are dead. If you are a “right to life” person, I would think you could grasp that reality.

No, these people are not paid to march. It doesn’t matter where the money is coming from when the opponents are people like the above. Why doesn’t it matter? Because people are dead and we are sick and tired of them getting dead where they should be safe. So it’s just fine that George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steve Spielberg all matched donations of 500,000 dollars to march for change.

No, these are not crisis actors. This has to be one of the sickest displays of heartlessness yet. Demanding proof of the dead like you and your armchair have that authority in the slightest way. Because these kids and their families should send you personal photos and obits and government or personal records to prove their dead children ever existed just so you feel satisfied that they have the right to grieve or utilize their own Constitutional rights. That isn’t just wrong, it’s horribly immoral. It’s sick and sickening. It’s a plague on morality and human decency. Some of these conspiracy theorists have gone so far as to track down families who claimed dead in mass shootings to harass and accuse them. How full of yourself do you have to be in order to do this?

Actual comment from someone on Facebook: “ It’s very easy to manipulate kids, because they don’t have all of the true stats and facts about gun deaths, gun ownership and crime. “   Like I pointed out above, apparently watching your best friends brains get spattered on the wall just isn’t enough of a qualification for you to care about any of it. Apparently you need to satisfy people like this with some sort of special test before you speak out against the atrocity you barely survived.

These are the things that are forcing me to pick a camp some of you won’t like. Because no matter how many times I say I’m not after the 2^nd amendment and there are no current actions against the 2^nd amendment, you gun zealots absolutely can not stay in that reality. Yes. You are forcing my hand to stand against you because I value protecting the lives out our children over a bang bang paper weight and the ability to wield it with abandon. What have we done to ourselves that we value any such thing over the lives of our children. What have we become?