I Don't Like Guns, So I Have to Think with My Brain

@OpenCarryTexas has blocked me on Twitter!

I kind of needed the ego boost today, so thanks.

It all started last weekend when I responded to their posting of the 37,412th version of their rallying cry:

Russell Dunnachie is the Arlington, Texas man who was murdered, along with his daughter, by his estranged wife Veronica Dunnachie, who happens to be a very active member of the Open Carry movement.

Her last Facebook profile pic.

If you'll follow the link in the previous paragraph, you'll see many instances of her prominently featured in Open Carry events in the DFW area.

This one even has the Open Carry Tarrant County watermark on it,
because they're proud of being armed to teeth at Super Target.

Of course, after a flood of vaguely worded messages of shock and support, all traces of Veronica Dunnachie have now been removed from the Open Carry Texas and Open Carry Tarrant County Facebook pages. Because those groups apparently didn't appreciate the publicity they were getting because one of their members decided to openly carry a gun into the home she previously shared with her husband and gun down two people.

Best/saddest/now deleted comment to this OCTC Facebook post:
"But her mother-in-law did." Amen.

So I decided to open a dialogue with @OpenCarryTexas about their campaign to erase their affiliation with and support of an accused murderer from their social media sites.

Now, it was a Friday night, and I was tired, so I went to bed at a reasonable hour. Yeah, my social life is shit. But OCT's can't be much better, because the next day I found this string of tweets directed at me:

I was so tickled! All that for little old me? You could tell that C.J. Grisham, or whichever of his trained monkeys mans the @OpenCarryTexas Twitter page, spent a lot of time and thought crafting these responses. Or looked them up in their "Risponding too the Medea" guide. Whichever. I felt badly for not being awake to immediately take up this intelligent debate of the issue at hand (the issue being that a person who advocated OCT's mission of desensitizing the public to the presence of weaponized people  in their midst extrapolated that mission to mean unloading her magazine at people who displeased her).

So I tried to make up for my tardy response with thoughtful rejoinders.

These are in the same order as the original queries, if you want to match them up.

I gotta say, I was a little crushed that I didn't hear back.

And then I discovered this.

And that kind of bums me, because I thought we had a real rapport. But I guess @OpenCarryTexas is less interested in rapport than it is in pretending that the America they live in actually agrees with their selfish, violent, bullying tactics.

I'm totally still willing and open to engaging in a mutually respectful exchange of viewpoints, as I think I expressed in my latest tweet:

I'd love to hear from a representative of the group to find out how they're going to steadfastly further their agenda while expressing appropriate responsibility for the actions of one their members. I think it would make for an enlightening conversation and a mutually beneficial airing of opposing ideas. I welcome that input.

For the record, I also believe I'm more likely to be harassed and intimidated (up to and including being shot just like Russell Dunnachie) than I am to ever be party to such a conversation.

Still, where there's life there's hope.

My condolences to the family of Russell Dunnachie, to whom I wish hope even where the lives of two loved ones have been stripped from them by an unstable person with an unhealthy affinity for deadly weapons.