Language itself is an issue when the topic is “guns,” and those who call themselves “gun rights advocates” go apoplectic and justify others calling them “gun nuts.” If people are scared to talk about gun violence, all of us lose.

At suggestions limits be placed on sale of “assault rifles,” I’ve heard people who love guns almost sneer and correct the speaker, and say there are no such weapons. (Hint: doesn’t matter the term you use, you’ll be called out if you favor limits.)

We have to discuss gun violence, and the lies that surround justification of “gun rights.” For one thing, there should be a limit on the number of guns a person owns. There can be “too many”, e.g., so many they fall out the windows of your house.

There are people who believe the 2nd Amendment protects private ownership of nukes. You read that correctly. The idiocy of that position would play out when a nuke would replace one of those pesky assault rifles at the next mass shooting.

One argument advanced by gun nuts is that guns protect us against tyranny: the accumulation of legislative, executive and judicial powers in the same hands, whether few or many. (Federalist 47; also Black’s Law Dictionary, 10th ed., p. 1753.)

In the past couple of months we have seen bullies with assault weapons show up at voting sites and at the Michigan capitol. They’ve threatened to hijack the votes of the electors so an unearned victory in the 2020 election can be handed to trump.

The argument “for” guns as protection against tyranny never was valid. Gun violence - and the threat of gun violence - is, and always has been, about mob rules. Little kids getting butchered in an elementary school didn’t wake us up.

We need to know the facts of gun violence. That means we should remove restrictions on CDC-sponsored peer review studies. Gun nuts like to say guns prevent more crimes than guns cause. If that is the case, why the heavy lobbying against peer review studies?

In the 1950s, tobacco companies ran TV about the health benefits of smoking cigarettes, but the same companies sat on research that showed risk factors in epidemiological studies that clearly established the link between mainstream smoke and cancer.

Gosh golly, I’d think that with as much money as gun companies have at stake, they would have conducted the appropriate studies. (I think we can infer the studies don’t establish that guns prevent more crime than they cause.)

The threat that armed thugs pose to our democracy should be seen for what it is. We need to reduce the number of firearms, and eliminate completely certain categories of weapons; to start, handguns and assault weapons should be banned.

While we wait for the studies to be conducted, we need to take a ton of guns off the streets. “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” Really? What do you call thugs who carry assault weapons into polling places?