The Internet Reacts To Jeb Bush's Dumb Gun Tweet

I’ve not the first problem with personal firearm ownership for home defense, hunting, or target shooting (note: none of these pursuits require assault weapon ownership; I have a huge issue with assault weapons as a whole).

I do, however, have a serious issue with defining an entire nation through firearm ownership. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel pretty extensively, having lived in Germany, France, and England (I worked in London, briefly, on an internship; I was actually offered a job with my intern site, but I was a year off of my baccalaureate degree, and I turned them down—every now and then, I wonder what might have been). In each of those places, I encountered people who equated America with guns.

Not all of them, mind. Not even most. But enough that the message was clear: we have a reputation as a nation of gun-toting persons.

This tweet does nothing to dispel that notion, everything to reinforce it—and, frankly, proves that Jeb! is so goddamn desperate that at this point he’s resorted to pandering to the, “You’ll pry ‘em from my cold, dead hands,” constituency—which is, sadly, larger in my immediate geographic area than I’d care to admit.

I know, I know—brevity’s the soul of wit, and the RTs above display much more wit than I did here—but, shit, this is depressing.