BY KAREN WEBB

Dear Rep. Dan Boren and House Second Amendment Support Group:

I regret to inform you that 11 citizens of rural Alabama were assaulted with what they say is an assault rifle. The shooter had plenty of ammunition, and it was only the intervention of the local police that prevented him from possibly killing more.

Just yesterday, I promised the guy in your office that I would be sending you a note and calling you to let you know how much I appreciate your defending the right to own assault rifles in this economy, every time one was misused.

I was hoping it would be more than 24 hours before I had to.

One sheriff’s deputy lost his wife and 18-month-old baby. I am sure the deputy will understand your views if the man was legally packing Rambo Ready Defense of Home and Hearth, RRDHH. The man certainly doesn’t sound like a typical gang-banger with a stolen Uzi, but we don’t know that. Everyone who knows him is really surprised, but that is usually the case. Most gangbangers would be surprised if one of their guys wiped out his entire family.

He could be totally in line with the Second Amendment. It is unfortunate he was not using a musket; fewer people would be dead. He could be part of a well-organized militia, like the Georgia Republic Militia, who are protecting themselves from the government’s unmarked black helicopters or he could be part of a not-so-well organized militia, like the Klan. I don’t really know what race he is and it shouldn’t matter.

He drove to a place where he supposedly voluntarily resigned in 2003. He is employed somewhere else now. I wonder why he would shoot people at a place where he had no problems. For Dan and his support group’s sake, I hope the man left a note saying he hated all of them and was just mad because someone used his tools without permission or he got the wrong thing for Christmas.

It wouldn’t help Dan’s cause if the man did it to protect his elderly family members because he couldn’t support them in this economy that Dan and his support group helped create. In 1929 stockbrokers, CEOs and millionaires were jumping from windows and killing themselves. So far, the guilty are not taking it out on themselves, this time. Ken Lay did, and if they don’t lock up Bernard Madoff, he might.

I don’t own a gun and am not going to buy one – even if people living very near me, on the same street, stomped a Hispanic kid’s head into the curb. Mama was there and according to her son, on the news, she taught them to fight. There are around 20 people in the group. None of them spent much time in jail. The kid was probably illegal, so most of Oklahoma won’t care. Putting an illegal teenager in ICU is nothing in Oklahoma. In fact, he should feel special if they didn’t wrap his head in an old towel and drop him south of the border.

Dan, I hope you and your group cry all day long over this, but you probably won’t. Dan, if am not paranoid enough in my neighborhood to become a one-person, well-organized militia, I can’t figure out why you need to be. Your neighborhood is more likely loaded with the greedy corporate thug type.

You get back to me, if you find out he was a gang-banger, but don’t expect an apology. My mama wisely taught me that just because others run off a cliff or kill each other off with assault weapons, it doesn’t mean I have to. If I get a gun then the neighbors could feel threatened and preemptively kill me and get by with it in Oklahoma.

Make my day, gunslinger Dan – send me another note loaded with crapola and you better vote “yes” on Employee Free Choice Act, but your note, as usual, wasn’t clear about your intentions. There was a lot of “I always have” or “I intend to in the future” without including what you might do to screw us today or this week.

– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer