Thing number one: Everybody and I mean everybody knew the vote was going to fail before it was taken. The odds are very high that Giffords, like all of the rest of us, was thinking long and hard about her response beforehand.

Second, just because someone has "impairments of her motor and speech functions" does not mean they can't think anymore—and if we find out that, shudder, the woman who was shot in the head in an act of gun violence had someone help her type out her message about gun violence, are we going to hear that the typing help means Gifford's arguments are invalid?

Third, what makes you think it isn't a "cry from the heart," or otherwise representative of Gifford's true feelings?

Fourth, you really think a very, very pissed off person could not pop off 900 angry but still-lucid words in the span of a few hours? Oh, Taranto, you and I have much to talk about.

And fifth, shut up, because screw off, that's why. The whole argument is insincere, and insipid, and and based on a much-needed dismissal of anyone who actually has skin in the game, in the fight over gun violence, so that we can all pretend that there are no real victims of gun violence, and even if there are, they're not nice people and they're really bossy and they probably, hint hint, deserved it somehow. If you have to go that far to dismiss the arguments of one of the nation's (many) most recent victims of our nation's gun incompetence—a congresswoman, at that—what the hell is wrong with you?

There seems to be an uncontrollable need on the right to denigrate the victims of gun violence—or, at least, the ones who dare speak out. Republican senators were openly dismissive of Newtown victims' families traveling to Washington to press them on last week's gun legislation, pooh-poohing them as mere props of the White House who couldn't possibly have opinions of their own on their dead children or what America should think about that. It may merely be a symptom of a movement that is so enmeshed in hating their opponents for the sake of hating them that they can't quite parse out when someone is not, in fact, one of their opponents. Or maybe victims of gun violence really are as hated by them as they seem to be, because they are an all-too-visible demonstration of the steep price of the status quo.