Dear Mrs. Brady:

‘Puter read with interest your opinion piece titled “30 years after the Reagan shooting, gun violence still reigns” in March 28, 2011”s edition of the Washington Post. To call it unfair, poorly reasoned and misguided would be understatement. It is, in truth, a vicious piece of propaganda filled with lies and half truths.

As an initial matter, ‘Puter believes that any law “in honor” of a victim is likely too weak to stand on its own. Otherwise, why would a sob story be needed to support it? Take, for example, the Brady Bill. Would the law be any less effective if it were not tied to President Reagan’s press secretary, your husband, critically injured in a (thankfully) failed assassination attempt? No, it would not.

If a law is good, it should stand on its own, without the need to pull at the heartstrings of your readers. Your piece commences with six paragraphs recounting your husband’s shooting. Nearly half of a fourteen paragraph piece. None of this information is in any manner relevant to your conclusion: namely, that Americans deserve a Utopian “America free of gun violence.” Further, simply stating a goal, without providing any concrete proposals to advance the goal is weak tea indeed. We’d all love to live in an “America free of gun violence,” Mrs. Brady. How exactly do you propose to get there?

‘Puter has the sneaking suspicion that your piece is devoid of serious content and concrete proposals because you know that most Americans do not accept your true agenda: banning private ownership of all firearms. Sure, you will deny that gun-banning is your aim, but your denial is false.

‘Puter can prove it. Without banning all guns and achieving perfect compliance with the law, how can we truly create an “America free of gun violence?” You can’t. You don’t even claim you can. Instead you rail against straw men.

You state that the Brady Bill has prevented 2 million people from purchasing guns. Without any proof whatsoever, you state that these people are “too dangerous and irresponsible to possess firearms.” Please provide data to prove your statement that each and every one of these denials involved a person too dangerous and irresponsible to possess a firearm.

Further, please explain, assuming for the moment that your unsubstantiated allegations are true, how denying a legal firearms purchase prevents the same purchaser from getting an illegal gun. Again, short of banning private ownership of firearms, and confiscating all existing firearms from citizens, you can’t achieve your goal. You attempt to link American gun violence to the existence of large capacity magazines. You state:

It’s hard to believe that despite this success, some conservatives who claim to revere Ronald Reagan still reject the common-sense gun reforms he backed. Reagan, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, believed in the Brady bill and the 1994 assault weapons ban, which helped stem the flow of those weapons of war to American streets. After the ban was allowed to expire in 2004, law enforcement reported a dramatic increase in seizures of guns using large-capacity assault magazines. It’s hard to believe that people who worship Reagan’s legacy would oppose policies he rightly understood would help save lives and dreams from the death and destruction of gun violence.

There’s so much wrong here, it’s difficult to know where to start.

First, so-called “assault weapons” included in the 1994 ban aren’t. The banned guns were all semi-automatic. True “weapons of war” are fully automatic, or fire short automatic bursts. Automatic weapons have been illegal without a federal firearms license (not easily secured) since the 1930s. The guns affected by the assault guns were (1) scary looking and/or (2) involved in high profile crimes, usually drug crimes.

‘Puter calls shenanigans on your conflation of semi-automatic weapons with automatic weapons. But, when your ultimate goal is unpopular, you have to hide it from the people, don’t you?

Then there’s this logical fallacy. Large capacity magazines were banned. After the ban expired, more weapons with large capacity magazines were seized by law enforcement. Therefore, the existence of large capacity magazines equals gun violence, and the magazines ought to be banned. To be fair, you don’t state the conclusion, but it is clear that’s where you are attempting to lead the reader. To support your conclusion that large capacity magazines are useless except for illegal killings, you’d need to provide a causal link, such as “after the expiration of the large capacity magazine ban, guns using such magazines were seized at the scene of illegal shooting in greater numbers than before the ban.”

You don’t provide such a link, so ‘Puter must assume one does not exist.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.