Note to gun owners: I don’t give a damn about your gun. I think guns are deadly. I think owning a gun is foolish. I think owning more than one gun is madness. (I think military weapons should be illegal.) I’m free to have these opinions just as you are free to have your guns. As long as your goddamn guns aren’t used to threaten people, to cause violence, to kill, or to demonstrate your smug moral superiority or terror, you can dress them up in hats and call them your girls, as far as I’m concerned. So, let’s drop this bullshit part of the “Culture War” that others exploit to keep us all riled up and distracted from the fact that the Rich want more, more, more. 

No one wants to take away guns from responsible gun owners. However, if you rage and howl about civil war and cold dead hands, you are NOT a responsible gun owner — you are a zealot. The angrier you are, the more dangerous you are with a gun — that’s not responsible. 

Now, assuming you are calm and sensible, as I hope the majority of gun owners are, you have an extra responsibility to speak to the nuts and rein them in. 

Stand down. Calm down. Work with others to develop gun measures that help reduce gun violence and also help punish those who use guns non-defensively. Stiff-arming us and shaking your weapons in the air while opposing everything as the paranoid “slippery slope” does no one any good. Help control gun violence. Prove you are responsible and decent, not a zealot. 

I’d appreciate gun owners pledging something other than “cold, dead fingers.” For example,

I pledge to practice gun safety at all times.
I pledge to keep my guns holstered or locked up when not in use.
I pledge to hunt for food, not solely for sport.
I pledge to aim my gun at a person only if I feel they may kill me or a loved one.
I pledge never to point a gun to intimidate, as a threat or a joke.
I pledge never to touch a gun in anger or rage.
I pledge empathy for those who fear or dislike guns.
I pledge to keep my guns out of the hands of others, unless they also pledge these things.

I hope Dallas taught you an important lesson: you’re outgunned. On your way to the gun store and shooting range, consider you can’t buy enough armor to protect yourself from a robot or drone. Even a well-trained sniper can’t hold out. How long would the Oregon wildlife refuge occupation have lasted?

I assume you’re searching the Web for info on IEDs, but the Feds have learned a lot overseas. That tech and info has come home. Good luck sleeping tonight.

A Week of Gun Violence Does Nothing to Change the N.R.A.’s MessageBy Evan Osnos , July 8, 2016

The Violence Policy Center, a gun-safety group, noted that, in 2014, the most recent year for which information is available, “one in five law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty were killed with an assault weapon.” The center’s executive director, Josh Sugarmann, said in a statement, “Responsibility for this lethal assault falls directly at the feet of the gun industry, which designs, markets, and sells the military-bred weapons necessary for such attacks. They must finally be held accountable.”

The Dallas ambush has also exposed an uncomfortable fact for the gun-rights movement: for decades, even as it maintains its abstract tributes to law enforcement, it has embraced a strain of insurrectionist rhetoric, overtly anti-government activism that endorses the notion that civilians should have guns for use against American police and military. In a 1995 fund-raising letter, the executive vice-president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, called federal law-enforcement agents “jack-booted thugs,” and suggested that “in Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” In Texas, where the police ambush occurred, an open-carry advocate last year urged the killing of state legislators if they do not approve a more relaxed policy. (“They better start giving us our rights or this peaceful non-cooperation stuff is gonna be gamed up . . . We should be demanding [Texas legislators] give us our rights back, or it’s punishable by death. Treason.”) At the annual N.R.A. convention last year, the board member Ted Nugent said, “Our government has turned on us.” Stopping short of calling for violence, he urged members to focus their ire on “the bad and the ugly.” He said, “It’s a target-rich environment. If it was duck season, there’d be so many ducks, you could just close your eyes and shoot ’em.” …

More than a hundred million Americans live in households with guns, but many remain largely uninvolved in gun politics. The N.R.A. has between three and five million members, which means it represents only a sliver of American gun owners. Moreover, even among its members, many are unconvinced, I and others have found, by the belligerent rhetoric; they own and love guns for a variety of reasons—from sports to hunting to self-defense—and they overwhelmingly support reasonable steps to prevent innocent people, civilians or police, from being killed by gunfire.

We must do more than cry and scream. We must do something to stop the war the police wage against US citizens. We are becoming an occupied nation in which the police don’t trust the citizens they serve. That lack of trust leads the police to murder innocent people.

In one sense, it doesn’t matter what the color, gender, etc, is of those who are murdered. On the other hand, it is clear that people of color, especially black males, are suspects at all times, while white people, especially older white males, get a pass. Even well-armed crazy white males. This has to stop NOW … TODAY.

Yet, I have no doubt that by the time you read this, another person will have been murdered by the police.

It’s time to disarm the cop on the beat. If a police officer travels alone, he cannot carry a gun. Wrap him head to toe in Kevlar and arm him to the teeth with non-lethal weapons. The only cops with guns will be those who operate as a group of 3 or more and have been very carefully vetted to have earned the right.