Gun owners who oppose gun control don’t deserve respect

I tweeted about this earlier today, but it’s so amazingly terrible that I need to blog it as well. Here’s a tweet by The New York Times promoting the latest column by their professional centrist, David Brooks:

If you want to stop school shootings, it’s not enough just to vent and march. It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points https://t.co/BBrlNIlzY3

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) February 20, 2018

Thousands dead every year, adults and children alike. Endless shootings in malls, churches, nightclubs, concerts and schools. A cartoonishly amoral cabal of gun manufacturers, lobbyists and bought-off politicians that’s spent decades flooding the country with weapons and then making it easier for wannabe murderers to own them whilst making it harder for law enforcement to keep track of them. A diseased culture that reacts with knee-jerk fury at the very thought of doing anything to staunch the hemorrhaging.

But no, those aren’t the real problem. The problem is that people who are tired of all the gun violence just aren’t respectful enough towards the people who enable the killings and empower the killers with their policies, who get their dander up at the thought of any kind of meaningful conversation about gun control.

No-one is shaming responsible gun owners, the vast majority of whom want tighter gun laws as much as anyone else. The only people being criticized are the ones who block any effort to take guns away from those who manifestly shouldn’t own them, the fetishists who cling to their right to stockpile as many military-grade rifles as they want. Those people don’t deserve respect; they deserve to be shamed until they go away and let the rest of the country clean up the mess they’ve helped perpetuate.

And right now, that includes revolting hacks like David Brooks and anyone at The New York Times responsible for publishing this drivel.

(via @petercoffin; retweet by @pzmyers)