Dear Beto,

Can I call you Beto? Great.

Anyway, I wanted to take a few moments to write an open letter to you regarding some of your recent thoughts on gun control. In particular, your comments regarding mandatory buybacks.

On The View earlier this week, Meghan McCain commented that such an act would trigger violence. Her comment sparked outrage all over the internet. You, yourself, argued that McCain’s comments amounted to “It becomes self-fulfilling; you have people on TV who are almost giving you permission to be violent and saying, ‘You know this is this is going to happen.’”

Allow me to clue you in on something, Beto. There’s not a single gun owner in this country who is looking to Meghan McCain for permission to oppose the tyranny of a mandatory buyback.

McCain’s comments weren’t permission, they were a warning. It wasn’t something new, something she just pulled out of the ether in order to spark some controversy. She’s merely echoing the statements people have made for decades regarding their willingness to die for their Second Amendment rights.

By claiming its a self-fulfilling prophecy and that people like McCain are giving people permission, you’re telling on yourself. You’re telling each and every one of us that you have never bothered to listen to a damn thing any of us have said.

I didn’t even know who Meghan McCain was when I first heard someone issue the dire warning that if some form of gun confiscation were to happen, the first thing the jackboots trying to take them would get was the ammunition delivered at high velocity. The gun-rights community has warned that efforts to take away or guns would lead to civil war for years now.

You just didn’t want to listen.

We often talk about lawmakers being out of touch, and you’ve just become the poster boy for that, Beto. You are so wrapped up in your liberal bubble that you simply can’t understand that this is a thing, this is something we’ve gone on about for ages. You can’t understand it because you don’t want to understand it. In your mind, we’re all just good little drones who will do whatever Big Daddy Government wants us to do.

We’re not.

We’re the heirs of Lexington and Concord. We’re the children of Valley Forge and Bunker Hill. We’re a defiant, freedom-loving bunch that isn’t rolling over because some spoiled rich kid thinks we should.

Let me make it clear for you. If you come for our guns, we are going to fight back. We don’t look to Meghan McCain for permission to do that. She could tell us not to, and we’d still fight back.

Beto, you need to understand. You need to learn. You need to come to grasp the simple fact that we’re not like you. We don’t look at government as an unmitigated good whose lead we should always follow. We have reasons for that. It’s called the history of the 20th Century filled with countless atrocities, atrocities carried out under the umbrella of government.

Those atrocities could only be carried out because the populations were unarmed.

We’re not sheep. We will not be herded into genocide all because some well-meaning but sheltered rich boy who has never lived in a high-crime neighborhood in his life could tell us what we need and don’t need.

Meghan McCain gave no one permission for anything. Further, gun owners don’t need such a permission. Our permission was penned in 1776 and signed on July 4th.