Wayne LaPierre, the Grand National Orifice of the National Rifle Association, infamously said in one of his emissions of verbal flatulence that “the guys with the guns make the rules.”

Anyone who dares to speak out on the American gun crisis has learned recently that the rules of the guys with the guns are cowardly threats.  LaPierre and others of his ilk have sought to mobilize fear and anger in the United States.  They want to get their pathetic troops out of their masturbatory fantasies in their grandmothers’ basements and onto the street, armed and ready to kill like so many jack-booted thugs.  They want to murder the First Amendment and anyone who exercises their rights under that Amendment to express an opinion with which they disagree.

This post is about an example.  It’s only one example out of many one could cite.

Last April I happened to appear for a few minutes in an excellent hour-long  CNBC documentary titled

“America’s Gun: the Rise of the AR-15.”  Here is a relevant clip from the documentary, which I highly recommend as having fully and fairly represented all of the many facets of this complex and troubling phenomenon.

I recently got a reply to the question I raised.  It was posted as a comment on this blog.

Here is that reply:

In a nutshell, one “G. Wright” answers that it is I that he (or she) — or in his (or her) squishily evasive convention “they” — would like to kill.

Who knew?

It turns out that I, Tom Diaz, am the very face of oppressive government.  I haven’t been elected to any office.  I don’t run a powerful lobby for the gun industry, like the NRA.  I am nothing more than a citizen expressing my educated point of view, as is my right to do under the Constitution of the United States.

Okay, if I am truly that powerful, I decree that the United States government take the cost of one (just one) nuclear submarine out of the Pentagon’s budget and spend it instead on building a decent education infrastructure in every town, city, hamlet, and school district on America.  Call me the “Education Face.”

Waiting…waiting…waiting.

As a rule, I do not allow trash like G. Wright’s emission into the comments section of my blog. I used to let all comments in.  But I realized that I was often just underwriting ignorance, the bleating know-nothingness of the Great Pestilential Stupidity that has infected America.

However, given the obvious passion of “G. Wright,” I decided to make an exception.  I emailed G. Wright and invited him to provide his name and a brief biography.  I figured that if  he felt so passionately about his “rights” and the commandments of his “God,” he would be proud to attach his name to his opinion.

I’ll be honest.

I was not the least bit surprised when it turned out that “G. Wright” is a coward, a snake in the grass, a weak and no doubt mentally unbalanced person who emerges from the night, spray-paints the world with his simplistic and ill-informed hatred, and leaves a fake email address as his calling card.

Here is the email I sent to him and the “bounced back” response I got:

Yep, “failed delivery” to [email protected].

As it happens, I know exactly who G. Wright is.  The following video describes him in some detail, and includes my response to his cowardly threat.

Let’s be clear about one thing.  G. Wright’s threat is not about me.  It’s about you, and you, and you.  It’s about whoever has an opinion that people like Wayne LaPierre, G. Wright, and other “guys with the guns” don’t like and don’t want this country to hear.

Shame on them. They are no different from and no better than the masked terrorists of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, or the Ku Klux Klan.

Shame on us if we let them get away with their terrorist campaign.