The popular, left-leaning Facebook group that mistook me for a gun nut last month has pulled the image of me that they put on their site. They actually pulled it on Monday, shortly after I ran an article illustrating the hilarious cluelessness of many of the Facebook page's users—many of whom thought I was holding a real gun, not a prop gun tied to the Halo video game, and then extrapolated that I was a possibly dangerous gun nut who was, well, overcompensating.
They pulled the image on Monday, but they have yet to respond to my Facebook messages to them. Their page, which still has the wonderfully ironic name of "Republican Bigotry Hate Fear Lies and Distortion", was swarmed by readers of my article who did post about the article and had a good laugh at how foolish these folks looked. (I screencapped some of the blowback the page got; those comments were deleted when the original image post about me was removed.)
I wasn't looking for an apology from them, but I was looking for a response. I'd wanted to know how they'd found my image and why they posted it.
The only sign of a reply had been a new post—which they've also since pulled but that I can show you at the top of this article. It included the photo of me again, this time coupled with more editorializing. They wrote:
What is more pathetic, someone who posts a picture of themselves with a replica of an over sized gun from a video game on the internet for attention, or the same person who cries about another page exposing him for the same reason… Looks like someone cannot take sarcasm then has his cronies stalk them on a daily basis.
Oh, it was just a joke! And I'm a gaming dork. And... and... these people still don't get it, not even when confronted with an actual explanation of the photo in the form of my article.
Two people who have tried to post about my article on that Facebook page tell me their comments have been deleted and that they've been banned from commenting.
Thus ends this week's lesson in how crowds of people on any side of a heated debate include any number of people who don't mind publicizing their ignorance. It seems the people running that page would rather hide their mistakes than talk through them or learn from them. How hard it is, I guess, to assume someone is your enemy and not know how to back down from them. What could have been a dialogue instead was all of this. What a pity.
(A special thank you to Andrew, for capping the image at the top of this post for me before it too was taken down.)