Hey there, NRA:

Listen, I know the moments after a gunman opens fire in a school are hectic for you. You have to get your talking points together, you have to mentally prepare to debate a traumatized yet sensible child, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and practice saying that more guns would have made the situation less deadly. It’s a busy time! And since we are always either in the moments after or the moments before a mass shooting, you’re pretty much always busy, I have noticed!

Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.

All of your guns.

Right now.

It wasn’t always this way. I have responsible gun owners in my family. I’ve never been a fan of shooting at things myself, but guns sure do seem to have brought joy into the lives of some people I love, and as long as they were stored properly, I never had a problem with them being around. I believed that we should place a hurdle or two between a psychopath and an AR-15, but that’s about as ardent as I got. Live and let live, that was my policy. Even with death machines.



That has all changed. And you changed it.

All along, as American life has gotten deadlier, as our kids have gotten less safe in their schools, you have had the opportunity to work with the vast majority of Americans who support the sensible reform of our gun laws. You have had the chance to preserve your own rights as we work together to keep our gun regulations in step with gun technology. You haven’t.



Students at Santa Fe High School in Texas hug each other in the hours after a gunman killed at least ten people and wounded as many on May 18. AP

All along, there have been opportunities for sensible, incremental changes. This year alone, we could have banned the manufacture of bump stocks, which turn semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones. We could have raised the minimum age for gun ownership from 18 to 21, or instate a national minimum age for long-gun ownership. We haven’t, largely because you have bought our government.

What you have done is double down. What you’ve done is convince your members that the occasional school shooting, the odd literal slaughter of innocents, is an unfortunate but inevitable quirk of American life, a thing that is necessary to preserve freedom. You have taken to our television screens to tell us that the world is an apocalyptic hellscape, and that the only way to be safe from gun violence is to stock our homes with guns.

You pushed legislation that cut funding from the Centers for Disease Control for research on gun safety in America. Research that might conclude that fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths, which leaves us with…no meaningful research on gun violence in America. Our ongoing studies on car safety have made cars, roads and highways safer—not without risk, but safer—yet no comparable studies can be done on guns.

Here’s what you get for that.

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

If you watch nothing else about the mass shooting at #SantaFe High School in Texas, watch this.



Her name is reportedly Paige.#SantaFeHighSchool pic.twitter.com/Xwy5VMCOTK — Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈 (@leahmcelrath) May 18, 2018

The young people of America are now expecting to witness gun violence in their schools. They are sitting in trigonometry waiting for the other shoe to drop, except the shoe can shoot 400 rounds a minute. That’s the result of all your hard work. There’s your prize. Stand up and take it!

Please also get a load of this guy.

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Guns and prayers: A man shows up to the Santa Fe High School (Texas) shooting with an American flag and a gun. Another man says "it's an embarrassment." pic.twitter.com/TAixNrJCPp — Scott McGrew (@ScottMcGrew) May 18, 2018

This morning, as an active shooter situation unfolded in his town, this guy decided to show up on the scene with a MAGA hat, a full-size American flag and a pistol on his hip, to…I guess attempt to be a hero? This is what your relentless fear-mongering gets us all: an adult human being taking a gun to a school to be helpful.

I was stunned and sad after Parkland. I was heartened by the efforts of the young people who watch their friends get murdered in front of them. I watched you make nice with them on CNN and then, behind their backs, call them terrorists. And then this morning I watched the same goddamn thing happen again, only this time at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, where at least ten people are dead. As though all of the marching and organizing and common-sense talking had never happened. As though this ever growing pile of young bodies is worth nothing.

So now I’m angry. Now I’m finished trying to reason with you. So now I, a guy who was ambivalent about guns just a few years ago, want to take your guns away. All of them. I want to take them all and melt them down and shape them into a giant sphere and then push it at you so you have to run away from it like Indiana Jones for the rest of your lives. I want Ted Nugent to roam the halls of his gunless house, sighing wearily until he dies. I want to end this thing once and for all, so that all of you who have prioritized the sale of guns over the lives of children have to sit quietly and think about what you’ve done. God help me, I want to take all of your guns out of your hands, by myself, right now.

It won’t happen, of course. So let’s meet in the middle. Let’s meet at…literally anything.

It’s happening. We tried it your way, and it really did not work. The ground is shifting. Get ready.

Dave Holmes Editor-at-Large Dave Holmes is Esquire's L.A.-based editor-at-large.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io