Dude,
We get it.
You love to rise before dawn and head out to your hunt club, or sit in your blind in the freezing autumn darkness. There's no joy like watching your Lab leap into your duck-hunting boat as you motor out onto the lake.
We read our Spinoza in Philosophy 101, okay? God is nature. Nature is God. With a gun in nature, you're a God. Check.
So, keep your guns. Go get that deer or duck or (if you're a bit of a toff), quail for your family.
Please, wear your camo.
Please, go to Bass Pro and stock up on ammo.
Please, teach your sons and daughters to hunt. To love the wild. To field dress a deer. To blast a raccoon out of your garden. To take down a snake in the yard.
Hoisting a rifle is part of who you are, the locus of your best memories with your father, grandfather, brothers and uncles.
Hunting feels like freedom.
In lean times, it's how you feed your kids.
But please do not conflate your love of sport, or even the love and protection of your family with the gun-lust of psychotics and domestic terrorists.
Please do not cast blue-state liberals like me -- folks who eat game only if it's covered in a deglazed sauce and served with baby autumn squash -- as spoilers of your fun or besmirchers of your manhood.
Seriously, we understand the difference between you and a lunatic who seeks military-grade weapons to commit mass murder.
We do not want a ban on guns.
We want a ban on crazy people who are empowered by assault rifles to kill scores of innocent human beings.
We want a ban on pissed-off and disenfranchised men who get their symbolic load off on weekend movie goers.
We want a ban on dudes who went off the rails, guys who hallucinate and can still walk into a gun show and buy a weapon of war.
We're just trying to get through a week without reading about another meaningless slaughter.
We're just trying to live in a country where common sense trumps lobbyists and bribe money.
Are we red-state and blue-state folks going to going to agree on many issues? Not likely. I can name 100 things we could argue about. Access to abortion. Benghazi. Affirmative action. Prayer in the schools. Racial profiling.
But when push comes to shove, and there's a walking bellow of rage waving an AK-47 around a shopping mall, I know we'd rush him together. I truly believe that.
We may not agree on much, but we both respect the sanctity of human life.
Thank you for listening. Let's have a beer that's not a photo op sometime. Go lube your gun, man. Hunting season is around the corner. We hope you enjoy it.