The Second Amendment drives some people to such depths of distraction, we are left to wonder about their overall emotional stability. Yes, people have strong opinions about the right to bear arms, and have since the earliest days of the Republic. But then we come across items such as this, from the web site of that old Lyndon Johnson fixer, Bill Moyers. The article references the NRA ad posted nearby. And it appears to have sent Mr. Moyers and his colleague, Michael Winship, into a tizzy:

Disgusting. Dishonorable. Dangerous. But also deliberate. Everything deplored by the NRA in the ad is committed by “they” — a classic manipulation turning anyone who disagrees with your point of view into “The Other” — something alien, evil, foreign.

“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”

“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”

Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.

It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns ” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling automatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.

We readily admit the ad is meant to generate a strong response -- that's exactly what membership ads are supposed to do.

But does the ad put the NRA on the side of "white supemacy and armed insurrection" as the Moyers/Winship piece charges?

No. But if one is a true believer in the anti-Second Amendment cause, any ad the NRA, or any other pro-Second Amendment organization, is reason to become hysterical (one doesn't use terms like "death on steroids" unless one has become seriously unmoored from their senses).

We note this astonishing tirade as an example of the rhetorcial and logical excesses lawful gun owners, and their advocates, must face. No evidence, no argument, no data, studies or learned analyses will ever convince this type of anti-Second Amendment crusader they might be wrong. The zealous are always convinced of their righteousness, and no attack, no matter how unhigned, is beneath or beyond them.

All we have to offer them is pity. And a stout resolve to defend our constitutional rights.