Letters to the editor have a long and storied history in this country. It's long been a means of public debate, one used long before the internet made everyone's social media a battleground. It also meant that people had to take a moment before replying, especially if they wanted to see their letter published, so things weren't so hostile.

Social media, of course, changed that.

I see a lot of letters to the editor. I don't write about most of them, typically because there's little new there.

However, every now and then, I'll find one that gives us a glimpse of something important we need to understand about the rank-and-file gun control advocate. I'll find a letter that includes nuggets like this:

Here's a thought — get rid of the guns and you'll get rid of the shootings (duh) and then do something about some of the underlying causes of the violence instead of playing the blame game.

Now, doing something about the underlying causes of violence is something I can get behind. I've openly and repeatedly advocated for just that so many times it feels like I'm screaming at a brick wall.

It's everything else that's downright terrifying.

Most gun control advocates at least pay some degree of lip service to the idea that we have a right to keep and bear arms. They say they don't want to take that away, only that we need to do something to make it harder for bad people to do bad things.

This letter writer makes no such pretense.

She openly advocates for getting "rid of the guns." 

She doesn't say anything about illegal guns or anything of the sort. Just "get rid of the guns."

Oh, she's completely wrong about getting rid of the shootings, too.

See, the problem is that getting rid of the guns is physically impossible. There are too many, and not all of them in law-abiding hands, to ever make that happen. While you can use the existing gun records to round up a lot of firearms, and intimidation may well prompt many to turn theirs in, the criminal underclass--the people doing all the shootings--will still have theirs.

What we'll end up doing is making life easier for these people because now there aren't any lawfully-armed citizens to get in their way.

Even if you could, you'd also have to wage a constant war with keeping guns out of the country from elsewhere.

While many like to pretend that all the world's ills are the result of our gun control laws, or the lack thereof, the truth of the matter is that where there's a demand, someone will try to meet it. That means guns from other countries smuggled into the United States rather than out of it. Don't try to tell me we could actually stop it, either, because we've been trying to keep drugs and people out for decades with no success at all.

But the author, ostensibly an average, gun control supporter, doesn't see any of that. She actually thinks you can just make the guns disappear and she actually wants to make that happen.

This is yet another reason why I don't believe them when they pretend they don't want to take all of our guns away.