I have something I’d like to say to everyone out there who thinks we need our semiautomatic weapons in case our government becomes tyrannical. My gawd, it’s a good thing for you that the government doesn’t take you any more seriously than I do. You call yourselves Americans? You call yourselves patriots? Taking up arms against the government is called treason, my friends, and as long as we have anything remotely resembling a functional electoral system, it's also called stupid.

How people like you can fly your American flags and display your patriotic bumper stickers and talk about the need for private citizens to have assault rifles to use against the U.S. government blows my mind.

You have apparently swallowed (hook, line, etc.) what is spewed by people whose main interest is in making money off of your paranoia. You have apparently not paid one bit of attention to the rational arguments made against those people.

My father gave 37 years of his life to the U.S. Army. He served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. I don’t know whether he would laugh or cry to read what you have to say, but I know good and well he'd recognize it for claptrap and poppycock.

If you’re holding on to your assault rifles so that we can rise up against the U.S. government, you are an idiot. The Second Amendment, you nitwits, was written so that the people could have a well-organized militia. Want to know why? Well, because we were, at the time, under threat from, y’know, people like the Canadians and the British and the Native Americans – all of whom had as good a claim on this land as we did (except the Native Americans, who had a better claim).

Yes, the nation’s founders took into account the possibility that their experiment in self-governance might not work. Hey, it had never been tried before. Fortunately for us, it’s really worked out fairly well. If you don’t like the government, you can vote against it.

And, believe you me, if the people of some states had decided to rise up against their elected government in, say, 1789 (that's a significant date – you might want to look it up), President Washington would have regarded them as traitors. James Madison (who introduced the Bill of Rights) would have regarded them as traitors. They would have been traitors.

Now, if George Washington had declared himself king (or dictator or something), treason would have been justified. But he didn’t. No president since has done that. Let me know if it happens, and I will join you in the NRA and do everything I can to topple our government.

But, you know what? If, gawd forbid, Obama declares himself king (or dictator or something), and we lose all of our rights and have to take up arms against the government, we're going to lose. You know why? We’re going to lose because our government has the most powerful military in history. And neither Obama nor anyone else could take over this country without the support of the U.S. military. So, if you take up arms against the U.S. government, you're going to be facing the U.S. military.

However – and this is important – in the meantime, you idiots are ignoring the real threat to our country. It’s not Obama or socialists or atheists or whatever you’re worrying about that might take over our country. What might take over our country is a coalition of the most privileged members of our society with the most gullible members of our society.

While the obscenely wealthy are distracting you with this unreal “threat” that you might suddenly become gunless, those who own the companies that manufacture guns (and technology and cigarettes and toilet paper and food and clothing and every other thing we have) are destroying us. They are raking in money at the most unfair rate since the Gilded Age, and you're not doing anything about it because they’ve made you afraid that you may not get to buy a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle.

Cry me a river, people.

By the way, we have guns in our house. The difference between you and me is that I am fine with our society having rules about our owning them.

But, that's because I am sane, and (frankly) you are not.

Diane Rudolph is a resident of Rock Hill.