Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie and his family know a thing or two about trigger discipline when it comes to handling firearms — and they also know how to trigger the left.
On Saturday, the Republican lawmaker posted a cheerful family Christmas portrait for the holidays on Twitter, in which every member is grinning and wielding a firearm.
“Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Massie wrote.
Merry Christmas! ?
ps. Santa, please bring ammo. ? pic.twitter.com/NVawULhCNr— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 4, 2021
Fellow gun owners and Second Amendment supporters were delighted, naturally, at the cheerful nod to proud, lawful and, might we say, safe gun ownership, as every member of the Massie family has their respective fingers and barrels in the proper place.
I hope the prosecutor for the Rittenhouse trial who waved around an AR-15 with his finger on the trigger, showing considerably less regard for basic gun safety than Rittenhouse himself, is somewhere taking notes.
Angry leftist Twitter users, of course, were too busy melting down to pay any attention to these kinds of pesky details, however, and many drew attention to the recent school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, in which an armed gunman with a callous disregard for human life opened fire on his classmates, killing four.
A horrific crime, no doubt, and highly disturbing. Still, it is a crime with which Thomas Massie and his gun-wielding family, of course, had literally nothing to do.
The Massie family Christmas photo was also linked inexplicably to white privilege, somehow, which is even further-fetched than linking it to a school shooting.
Wow , what timing! After 4 kids were gunned down. An entire family of terrified, weak, losers. Have you no shame?
— Sebastian Roché (@sebroche) December 5, 2021
If you had even one iota of understanding as to what’s it’s like to have to tell explain to a mom or dad that their child is never coming home again — well let’s just say your requests from Santa may be different.
What a shame ?? https://t.co/8oEEh22Akm
— Joseph Sakran (@JosephSakran) December 5, 2021
Last year in the US over 5000 children were shot. Over 1300 died. Yet a Republican politician decided this is the festive photo. Now imagine, if this was a photo by a black or Muslim family this Christmas. This is what a White Privileged Christmas looks like. Disgusting. https://t.co/VtCofMsOAn
— Adil Ray OBE (@adilray) December 5, 2021
I can’t leave this alone.
As if Christmas was about celebrating the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus, King Herod, Pontius Pilate and their power to unleash lethal violence.
This is not what Christmas is about.
This is not what “peace on earth” looks like.#StopStealingChristmas https://t.co/GpD7wsygZZ
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) December 5, 2021
The establishment news pounced as well, expertly serving up the left-wing, anti-gun narrative.
Reuters ran with the headline “U.S. congressman posts family Christmas picture with guns, days after school shooting,” and NBC News went with “House Republican posts photo of his family holding guns days after Michigan school shooting,” while CNN published an opinion piece professing to explain “What Rep. Massie’s Christmas photo says about today’s GOP.” (It’s nothing good, apparently.)
An unperturbed Massie, true to form, hit back with his personalized #SassyWithMassie hashtag when one Twitter user suggested he had tunneled underneath “the bar.”
LMAO pic.twitter.com/tSVVdCN8EA
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) December 4, 2021
As someone who has lost a dear friend to gun violence, it infuriates me to no end how selective the outrage about guns and gun violence can be. People are killed by guns when antisocial criminals with no regard for human life decide to use them against innocent victims, in the same way that criminals and psychopaths use knives, fists, blunt objects and even vehicles to destroy life. To say nothing of the abortionist’s tools.
Do we yell at everyone who posts a picture of themselves holding up their fists like they’re Rocky? Showing off their new sushi knife? Doing some weekend home repairs with a hammer?
More to the point of current events, did anyone get upset by photos of people near SUVs after the Waukesha massacre?
Or why not dig deeper — why don’t rappers ever get attacked for supposedly promoting gun violence when they pose with firearms on album covers or in music videos? Or stars of Hollywood action movies that feature gratuitous gun violence?
Why is it only supporters of legal gun ownership that get slammed? It’s never the people who glorify reckless, violent gun use, or death in general, such as the music, gaming and film industries.
It’s never the people who make shooting human beings seem cool, who go to great lengths to provide artificial visuals of horrific violence and death for the sake of sick entertainment alone.
It’s always the people who celebrate lawful, safe gun use.
Thomas Massie, of course, is a Republican, which means that when he’s glorifying guns, he’s glorifying the constitutional right to bear them.
This right is not only sacred, but it is also guaranteed under the framework of a system of governance that stipulates the people govern themselves.
Our Second Amendment does not stipulate that citizens have the right to kill another person (although the left seems to think killing unborn persons is guaranteed by the constitution, which it is most certainly not).
It is the right to keep and bear arms that can be used to defend your person, community or country, should the situation arise.
The left is hardly bothered by the celebration of murder; in fact, they seem to love it. They glorify the slaughter of unborn babies in the womb, sympathize with rioters and terrorists and fawn over every leftist celebrity who has a half-baked political opinion that sounds like their own without ever criticizing Hollywood’s sick obsession with blood, guts, gore and the glamorization of criminal violence and other depraved acts.
They certainly didn’t care when a man plowed his SUV into a crowd of innocent, unsuspecting Christmas parade viewers, swerving left and right so as to cause the most carnage. No, progressive pundits were still too preoccupied with their outrage that a young man like Kyle Rittenhouse can’t go to prison for the rest of his life for using a lawful firearm to defend his life when attacked.
They also don’t seem to care about shootings that happen outside the realm of an easily manipulated narrative, such as every weekend in Chicago. While the left was freaking out over Massie’s tweet, 30 people were shot in the Windy City over the weekend, 9 fatally.
Why wasn’t he accused of insensitivity in light of these shootings? Why was it only criticized in light of the shootings at a Michigan high school? Could it possibly be that Chicago already has many of the gun control measures left-wing politicians are hoping to implement, to notably little effect as far as stopping gun violence goes?
This is what’s truly sick about the whole thing. No one can talk about or show their firearms because there was a shooting in Michigan, but the left can pick and choose which instances of gun violence they wish to exploit for their own political aims?
The left is bothered not by gun violence but by gun rights — and gun rights alone.
Gun control activists often try to claim that they’re not opposed to gun rights, just, you know, people owning and having basically every form of firearm other than Elmer Fudd’s preferred weapon for hunting rabbits.
This is a lie. That ship has sailed, in large part thanks to Beto O’Rourke, who admitted defiantly in 2019 that “h*** yes,” he wants to take our guns.
This isn’t about violence. This certainly isn’t about the value and worth of human life.
It’s about our guns — and carefully calculated left-wing talking points that have been designed to convince the American people to angrily cry for their own sacred rights to be stripped away from them.
And that’s the really scary part.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
