Dear …,
I’m not one given to excess emotion; I think I learned that from being in the Army. And I have never written a letter like this one but it’s way overdue.
You who have long been supported by the NRA and have followed its commands in lockstep, you are drenched in the blood of the massacred. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that almost literally.
After all of these massacres, your consistent and blind refusal to save the life of even one of our people by passing legislation outlawing assault weapons means, frankly, that you are complicit in the deaths of so many, including those in Las Vegas.
You can turn away but you can no longer hide. You have become, and listen to me, Un-American. The land of the free; freedom from the carnage, not freedom to own assault rifles and semiautomatic weapons. Our Founding Fathers had no concept of that, so don’t try to wrap yourselves in the Second Amendment. It won’t work this time.
You have become the Dorian Grays of legislators, except now we see you for what you really are: cowards, kneeling at the foot of that cold, stone faced NRA.
You now have a sense of how infuriated I am with you. And before you get all indignant, I want remind you of something you have long since forgotten: constitutionally, you serve me, not the other way around.
I am so unbelievably angry at you because I saw death in Vietnam and understand its awful consequences. Young men, on both sides, eyes open, in their uniforms, limp. Wasted. You, you’ve seen it in some open casket at a funeral home. Congratulations you hypocrites. You’ve seen death too, but you have little real understanding of it or you would have been advocates for gun control instead of perpetrators of death.
I don’t believe in Hell, and I do believe in forgiveness. But at this very moment, just for right now, I wish there was one and that you all would be damned to it.
And I am not alone in that sentiment.
Yours in raging anger and utter disgust,
Jon Nelson
