Paul Ryan got upset and ended an interview with a local ABC reporter for asking him a pretty simple question. It was clear that Team Romney won’t permit Ryan to do an interview, or continue an interview, with anyone who seems prepared to question the Romney campaign’s lies.

In this case, Ryan and the reporter were talking guns, and Ryan was arguing that more gun control won’t help stop crime, bringing opportunity to the inner city will stop crime. So the reporter responds, “And you can do all that by cutting taxes, with a big tax cut?”

Well, them are fighting words, apparently.

“Those are your words, not mine,” Ryan responds to the tax cut question. “Thank you very much, sir,” Ryan’s staffer jumps in. “Yeah, that was kind of strange, you’re trying to stuff words into people’s mouths,” Ryan says while his staffer tries to hold a piece of paper in front of the camera (it’s not entirely clear what he was afraid of people seeing). “I don’t know if that’s ‘strange,'” the reporter says. “No, it sounds like you’re trying to answer the question for me,” Ryan responds.

No it didn’t. It sounds like the reporter asked Paul Ryan if his proposed massive tax cuts for the rich are the magic bullet that Ryan thinks are going to stop crime in the inner city by bringing opportunity. What was so difficult about the question? It’s basic GOP trickle-down economics.

The Romney campaign later told Buzzfeed that the question was “strange” and ‘weird”:

The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts. Ryan responded as anyone would in such a strange situation.

The question was pretty straight-forward. Do Romney and Ryan think tax cuts are going to help people in the inner cities. Yes or no? It looks less like the question was strange, and more like Ryan was afraid he was entering 47% territory, i.e., how does a tax cut help you if you don’t even earn enough to pay taxes?

Or as pay Ryan calls such people, un-American “takers.”