A couple of years ago there was this “violence planner” named Bob Bateman, whose hoplophobic keyboard emissions became infamous on the Internet as arrogant, disingenuous, and tyrannical, drawing the ire of such defenders of the Constitution as Tom Kratman, Michael Z. Williamson, and Jonn Lilyea. Bateman was a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, who claimed the moral authority and expertise to relieve you of your rights, because he was a planner of violence. “I orchestrate violence,” he claimed, and then proceeded to cry about how gun rights advocates “threatened” him and made him cry. As you can imagine, the ridicule was epic.

More recently, another Army occifer dope named Dan Helmer, who is running for Congress in Virginia’s 10th District, tried to use a similar appeal to authority (and a whole lot of obfuscation and lies) to derp about “assault” weapons, of which he showed precious little knowledge.

And now there’s Becky. Becky, you see, is a veteran, which she repeatedly points out, whose “vast” knowledge of firearms includes hunting trips with Daddy when she was 12 and “honing” her skillz with an M-16 at West Point.

I remember learning that the 5.56 mm ammunition used in assault rifles is intentionally designed to slow down upon impact so that it can tumble through the victim’s organs and inflict maximum casualties.

Let’s put aside this claim, because I know others who claim to have been taught this in the military. Let’s focus on the fact that the rifles used in school shootings from Columbine to Santa Fe had nothing to do with rifles we used in the military. Semi-automatic rifles, handguns, improvised explosives, but no select-fire or automatic firearms. The fact that Becky tries to conflate military weapons with the firearms used in school shootings shows her to be either ignorant or disingenuous. Neither one is good.

Following graduation from West Point, I commanded two Special Operations companies – small forces structured to complete the most physically and politically challenging missions. Multiple times a year, year after year, we underwent recertification on the weapons that were most central to our mission. Going to the range was treated with the utmost of gravity and military discipline. There was no joking around on the range. Every single round of ammunition was accounted for every single time.

Note the following:

Becky tries to create the impression that she was some kind of kickass female who was in charge of commandos. She wasn’t.

Becky was in when women weren’t allowed in combat, and certainly not in Special Forces. From everything I’m reading, she may have been Civil Affairs. Nothing wrong with that, but the fact that she obfuscates her actual experience by claiming to have commanded SpecOps companies and doesn’t give details about her job, tells me she is intentionally masking her real background to bolster her “street cred” as a firearms expert, vice just another troop who qualified once per year like the rest of us.

I left the Army after completing nine years of service. Right around that time, the shooting at Columbine High School happened. I was heartbroken and horrified to hear how the weapons I had trained to use so carefully – including weapons that don’t belong in civilian hands – had been used in a school to end the lives of 13 innocent children and educators.

Someone please tell me what Army issues these.

• Intratec TEC-DC9.
• Hi-Point 995 Carbine.
• Savage 67H pump-action shotgun.
• Stevens 311D double barreled sawed-off shotgun.
• 99 explosives.
• 4 knives.

These were the weapons used in Columbine. I’d like to know what Army carefully trained Becky to use these weapons.

I never would have imagined that nearly two decades later, gun violence would still plague our communities. Gun violence still takes an average of 96 lives a day in our country. And, as the years have passed, we’ve mourned the lives taken at mass shooting after mass shooting – Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Orlando, Sutherland Springs. The list goes on and on.

Fact: in 2016, according to the CDC, there were 38,658 deaths by firearms, including homicides, suicides, legal interventions, and accidents.

Fact: 22,938 – or 59.3 percent – of those deaths were suicides.

Fact: A suicide is not gun violence. Suicide is feeling so much agony, that you feel only ending it permanently will stop the pain, and no amount of legal maneuvering, policy changes, or regulations will change that. As a matter of fact, Japan – where guns are effectively banned – has a much higher suicide rate than the US, where guns are aplenty.

Fact: 38,658 deaths per year is less than one percent of our population, and when you subtract suicides from this scenario, the 15,720 people who died from gun shot wounds in 2016, (which includes not only legal intervention, but accidents and other undetermined causes) is such a tiny percentage of the population, my calculator, can’t even fathom it.

Recently, we’ve added two devastating school shootings to the list – Parkland, Fla. and Santa Fe, Tex. As a mom to two young children, these shootings have forced me to reflect on who we are as a nation. I find myself wondering: Should we be homeschooling our children? I increasingly wonder if they are safe in their school. With school shootings occurring once a week on average, I would have to be a fool to think “it can’t happen here.”

Nice Everytown talking point here, Becks, but even Snopes is calling bullshit on that one, because it includes a BB gun shooting, a shooting at a school that had been closed for several months when the “shooting” occurred, an incident in which someone fired shots at students from a vehicle in the school parking lot, with no one injured by gunfire, and stray bullets hitting a school building.

Once again, I have to wonder if Becky is simply ignorant of the facts, too lazy to do her research, or is intentionally misleading. Given her obfuscation of her job in the military in order to create the illusion of firearm expertise, I’m thinking it’s the latter, because the information from unbiased sources is out there for anyone to find.

I don’t want homeschooling to be the solution. I want my kids – everybody’s kids – to go to school, play and learn with their friends, and be confident that they will come home to our family at the end of the day. I want our kids – everybody’s kids – to be safe. Evil flourishes when good people shutter their windows and hide. Evil flourishes when people with privilege – people like me – engage in conceptual debates about protecting ourselves from government tyranny (good luck against a drone strike) when every day we lose 96 of our brothers and sisters.

You know when evil flourishes? When clueless princess snowflakes like Becky engage in debates and reductio ad absurdum fallacies and use doctored statistics and outright lies, while appealing to their alleged “authority” and firearms “expertise” to push a bullshit political agenda.

I know that as a country, we can do better. If we work together, we can fix the gun violence problem that plagues our communities. We are the people who put a man on the moon. Surely, we can find a way to stop shooting our children. We must lean into our discomfort together across all sides of this issue and find common ground.

So while Becky takes a backhanded swipe at Americans who discuss legitimate concerns about citizen disarmament, the historical reasons for the inclusion of the Second Amendment in our Constitution that protects an existing right to stand up against a tyrannical government by snarking “good luck against a drone strike, proles,” and lies about… well… pretty much everything relating to guns, she claims wants us to work together. She reminds me of David Hogg, who has denigrated law-abiding gun owners murderers and terrorists, while calling for civil discourse on gun control.

Whatever, Becks.

Oh wait – we already have common ground. We need to stand firmly in that common ground and not allow the gun lobby to purchase our politicians who have done absolutely nothing to prevent these tragedies. And we need to not be duped by elites using wedge issues to divide us. We have so much more to gain by standing together across this issue and many others.

The common ground is that we all want kids to be safe. We differ in our solutions and approaches to this problem. Becky lies, obfuscates, and insults the American people, and the rest of us understand that banning guns, outlawing private sales of guns, and other gun control measures punishing those of us who did NOT commit crimes with our guns, will do nothing to solve the problem.

The reality is that we know a lot about how to prevent gun violence. For example, we know that in states that require a criminal background check on every gun sale, lives are saved. Many people who commit mass shootings have a history of red flags – and we know that disarming people who have demonstrated that they are a threat to themselves or others helps reduce firearm suicides. We know that every single civilized nation in the world does better on this issue than we do, so I recommend we also suspend our arrogance long enough to get curious about what they’re doing.

Lie: in states that require a criminal background check on every gun sale, lives are saved.

Fact: Only eight states, including DC, according to Factcheck. org, that have “universal background checks,” and despite what the statist prick Chris Murphy (D-umbass, CT) will tell you, there’s been no research showing a causal relationship between firearm mortality rates and universal background checks.

Much like Becky, Murphy has been doctoring his statistics.

In fact, Murphy is citing an average firearm mortality rate for states with universal background checks. But the states’ individual rates vary. Some of them have higher firearm mortality rates than states that don’t have universal background checks.

[…]

Colorado, the District of Columbia and Oregon had rates higher than the national average, which was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2016, according to the CDC.

They also had higher rates than Maine (8.3 deaths per 100,000), New Hampshire (9.3), and Vermont (11.1) — three states that have no state laws on background checks and received an “F” grade for the strength of their overall gun laws from the Giffords Law Center.

When FactCheck.org shows you to be a disingenuous dildo, you might want to reconsider your life choices.

Lie: We know that every single civilized nation in the world does better on this issue than we do, so I recommend we also suspend our arrogance long enough to get curious about what they’re doing.

Fact: Becky might want to look in the mirror and suspend her arrogance long enough to do research that is not doctored by Everytown or gun grabber politicians.

The U.S. has a violent crime rate lower than 12 of 17 industrialized countries due in large part to the 2.5 million annual defense gun uses.

The top 100 countries for homicide do not include the U.S. The top ten countries all have near or total firearm bans.

Since gun banning has escalated in the UK, the rate of crime – especially violent crime – has risen.

Ironically, firearm use in crimes in the UK has doubled in the decade since handguns were banned.

Britain has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe, more so than the United States or even South Africa. They also have the second highest overall crime rate in the European Union. In 2008, Britain had a violent crime rate nearly five times higher than the United States (2034 vs. 446 per 100,000 population).

I could go on, but you get the message.

Becky makes deceptive claims quoted nearly verbatim from biased “sources,” if you can even call them that, which makes her either ignorant or a liar. (Although, in this case, I would probably embrace the healing power of “AND.”)

And speaking of deceitful claims…

She falls back on her appeal to “authority” again, so hard that the Fallacy Ref may have fainted from having to wave his arms so hard.

As a veteran, I’m intimately familiar with the destructive power of firearms. And, I know how important it is to make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands. I also know that many Americans look for leadership from veterans on issues like gun violence prevention.

Yeah, Becks. I’m fairly sure that since you popped smoke before seeing any real action, and would have likely ridden that FOBbit desk had you stayed in, your “intimate” familiarity with firearms smacks of massive exaggeration, unless you’re referring to that pistol-shaped dildo your wife got you for some role playing action.

I’m also fairly sure many Americans look for leadership from veterans who aren’t bloviating liars and who aren’t trying to trample on their Constitutional rights, especially on matters that affect their ability not just to protect their loved ones and their property, but also stand as a last bulwark to tyranny.

So as a veteran, I humbly suggest to Becky that she needs to go back to what she knows. And that isn’t firearms or gun policy.