Jan Schakowsky: Just because she's out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid.

Jan Schakowsky . . . there's a name you haven't heard for awhile, huh?  If you're not from Illinois, maybe you've never heard of Congresswoman Schakowsky before, but she's politician-famous in Chicagoland. She has a long history of advocating for, as she puts it in this video, "pushing as hard as we can and as far as we can" to ban guns or, failing that, to harass citizens who want to use them.

This is the part where I sarcastically remind you that nobody wants to ban your guns and, by the way, you are clearly paranoid. Also that Jason Mattera is an unfair meanie.

One thing all this high-profile attention on guns and rights has done is to bring in a lot of people who really weren't paying any attention to the issue until a couple of months ago, on both sides.  Nothing wrong with that, but one effect of that influx of n00bs is that we now have an awful lot of people running around who are pretty sure they've got a simple solution and have no idea why the idiots who've been paying attention for the last decade or three haven't simply solved the problem already. In short, they don't know what they don't know. One of the things they're very sure of is that nobody wants to ban anybody's guns, and anyone who talks about gun bans is a stooge for the massive weapon cartels who pull the strings at the NRA. A good friend gave me a hell of a lecture recently; she'd put out the statement on Facebook that "nobody is going to ban your guns.  Get over it." I pointed out several times that this was not the issue; "I knew my attack on you wasn't going to work, so it's OK" is not an acceptable excuse. The point is that there are people who certainly would ban guns and confiscate my property if they had their way, and the only reason they don't have their way is that people like me prevent it by dint of hard work. 

• I don't have to let you crash my car because it's got seatbelts and airbags, and
• I don't have to let you torch my house because I have fire extinguishers, and
• I sure as hell don't have to shut up while knowledge-free debates over whether to infringe my rights and confiscate my property are carried out by my betters.