A 'Koolaid drinker' is one who buys into a narrative without questioning it, whether it's the 'transwomen are women' set, the 'Trump won' brigade, or the now-ludicrous "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." As mass shootings have now become a multiple-daily occurrence, everyone knows that's as much of a Koolaid lie as anything else the NRA is pushing at the Toxic Cocktail Open Bar, since that almost never happens. I know it did happen once, last week, for the first time in several years. The purple-moustached NRA crowd is over the moon with that. "See? See? We tolja!" Except for that annoying FBI report that shows only 3% of mass shootings or even just gun crimes are stopped by civilians with guns, and that the vast majority, if they're stopped by anyone, are with unarmed men.

Clearly, y'all are never around when we need you, which is genuinely weird since we have more guns than probably any country on earth.

And while I regard you as a largely critical thinker here, Dave, and understand your perspective is a little different as a veteran (which means I take you more seriously since you've been trained on how to use a gun, as well as to how to dehumanize the enemy), I still find you a little suspiciously grape-smelling. The carping and kvetching you're doing about semantics reminds me rather a lot of the gender identity set. Trying to distract with semantics and fine points from the fact that too many people with guns are clearly too irresponsible and violent to have guns, and it goes far beyond convicted felons.

So yes, *those* people - the nutbags who clearly shouldn't have them, like Uvalde Boy - should be very, very afraid. We ARE coming for their guns. Whether we'll get them or not remains to be seen, but there are many thousands of black marks against the 2A Forever set, and not just mass shooters. There's all the suicides and gang murders/massacres - the latter being the ones Black Lives Matter remains silent upon.

I've often said (maybe not here, since we don't talk about guns much) is that I'm not against guns, I'm against idiots with guns. America has a lot more idiots than it had fifty years ago. That article I referenced covers pretty much everything wrong with the NRA today, and why so many so-called 'law-abiding' gun owners, well, aren't. Domestic abusers have *got* to be shitting their pants in fear right now. They should be.

And *no* civilian needs military-style weapons, period. Another big freakin' honkin' mountain of evidence against the Koolaid-drinkers is all the countries who don't have our gun homicide problems because they *eliminated* this shit. It even happens here. We enacted a ban on assault weapons and Congress let it lapse. And homicides shot way up, but not as much as they have today, especially in the last two years after the pandemic made *everyone* a little nuts (or more.)

Look, if you're a 'responsible gun owner', none of this should be a problem for you. The evidence would be too convincing to you too, and you'd say, "I agree, Nicole, only responsible, non-violent people should have guns. People with a violent history shouldn't be allowed anywhere near them." And you don't need assault weapons to protect your family or hunt. I know there are different types of weapons for different occasions, you buy a handgun for protection against home intruders and different types of rifles for different types of game. But there's no need for assault weapons for any of this. The only place where they're arguably used in defence is in military combat. In America, they're used solely to mass murder.

So if you 'responsible gun owners' want our respect, you're going to have to drink less Koolaid and pay more attention to the evidence. You can carp about technical details all you want, but we don't care - you're right about one thing, guns don't kill people, *people* kill people. So we don't want the wrong people having or owning guns, and we need to close a lot of loopholes to reach that.