Open Letter

(The following by guest author Jane Dark:)

While I appreciate the refined level of discourse here at Long Sunday, I'd like to bring it down a little. What follows is my open letter to the National Rifle Association.

Dear NRA,

You pussies.

That's right, National Rifle Association, I'm talking to you. You are cowards, lightweights, hypocrites, hand-wringing do-nothings.

My recollection is that it has been claimed you're just gun-toting bullet-freaks interested only in your right to extreme animal-killing convenience and click-click-boom phallic stroke fantasies, maybe popping off at the occasional illegal immigrant.

And my further recollection is that you have defended yourself against such scurrilous accusations through the patient insistence on your constitutional right to bear arms. You, the NRA, would be part of a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state."

Which is to say, your entire position and organization rests on the proposed belief that when bad government abrogates your rights and freedoms, and leads the nation along a course which the citizens have not mandated -- using force of arms to do so -- you are prepared and willing to resist that course, and refuse that government, using every means at your disposal, including the means guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

And yet we find ourselves with a government that is currently in the midst of an escalating military action seemingly not mandated by the population -- an action which is either explanation for or parallel with increasing depredation of your civil rights, most ominously in the case of the Fourth Amendment but as well the Sixth and Eight at a bare minimum. Were there to be a doomsday clock of civil rights, sometime in these last months we would surely have heard its chimes at midnight.

That the electoral legitimacy of the President whose administration has in main authored these violations is shrouded in doubt would seem to argue even further for a principled refusal of this abrogation of the rights and interests of the American people.  This should be your finest hour. This is what you have been waiting for; on moments such as this is the very justification for both your rights and your existence premised. If you will not in the gravest and most evident circumstances exercise the freedom invested in you by your beloved Second Amendment, your authority to claim it must be found to have withered. And surely these are dark days. If not now, when?

What are you waiting for, you pussies?

Respectfully submitted,

Jane