Gun control is a contentious topic here in the United States. Both sides of the debate have their reasons for choosing those sides, of course, and it’s important to at least try and understand where the other side is coming from. Not so you’ll change your mind, necessarily, but so you can articulate the debate in a way that addresses their concerns and doesn’t grossly mischaracterize their position.

Yet it seems that not everyone is interested in this.

Over at The Good Men Project, it seems they’ve taken then and are now arguing that you can’t be a good man and support gun rights in a piece titled, “There Is No Greater Injustice Than Supporting Gun ‘Rights’ Over Children’s Lives.”

I’m a Texan. I can fire a rifle. I’ve attended rattlesnake roundups as a child. I’ve spit buckshot out while eating quail my uncle shot. You don’t want to mess with me.

Single-shot rifles aren’t ARs. They don’t shoot multiple rounds into the soft, tiny bodies of children who are doing nothing more sinister than sitting in their school classrooms trying to learn.

I will not argue with gun rights advocates here or anywhere. This escalation of fire-power was never about the right for the American populace to arm themselves against threats of insurgency or autocratic government overreach nor against attacks against us on our shores by foreign powers.

This has always been about money, greed, and power. To the NRA leaders and the bubbas, military-style weapons in the hands of Americans are power. The power of overkill. The power to disregard others’ safety, including that of school children. The power to wave a big gun around to substitute for other inadequacies.

In other words, you can’t be a good man if you don’t support gun control.

Of course, this author holds up being Texan as if it’s some talisman from criticism. He holds up having eaten game taken via hunting as if it burnished his bonafides in some way.

It doesn’t.

For all his talk about greed, he failed to account for a few factors.

One, his beloved gun control groups bring in as much if not more money than the NRA does. They spend just as much, again if not more, than the NRA to get their preferred officials elected. Both sides play the money game and don’t pretend otherwise.

But again, he’s arguing as if we really all actually agree that gun control works and we’re just not stepping aside and letting people like him have their way because of that greed he talks about.

That’s because he has never bothered to actually listen.

Yes, many of us talk about our rights. We do so because those rights matter and our rights shouldn’t be pushed aside for any reason.

Yet that’s not all the pro-Second Amendment side brings up during debates. We also bring up the fact that it just doesn’t work.

“But studies show…”

No, they don’t. Every study that I’ve termed “anti-gun” has severe and profound issues. Those issues have been brought up and discussed, though gun control advocates rarely wish to address these criticisms. They just pretend they don’t exist.

So why then should we roll over and allow ourselves to be disarmed? Yes, mass shootings are awful enough on their own but are especially terrible in a school, but they also account for less than one percent of all homicides. That means they’re an even smaller percentage of total violent crime.

That means disarming people so they can’t defend themselves from the more common kinds of violent crime makes absolutely no sense. Especially since we know that criminals will still be able to get firearms no matter what you do.

But how would this author know any of that? He’s already said he’s not interested in debate, discussion, or argument.

No, this “good man” wants, instead, to stomp his feet like a spoiled three-year-old child and demand we capitulate to his desires.

If that’s what The Good Men Project is about–and from what I’ve seen, it is–then they have the most ironically named site in the history of the internet. After all, there’s nothing “good” about petulant behavior and there’s nothing manly about acting like a child.