Oh the Horror! We Gun Owners are gagging Free Speech! That is pretty much the summary of Timothy Egan’s rant “The Great Gun Gag.”

I love that the first thing he does is to accuse republicans and Gun Owners of believing in evil conspiracies and then he goes on to rant about his version of gagging the conversation about gun control. But then he gets even better:

The most armed society in the world, ranked first among 179 nations in the rate of gun ownership, had 9,146 gun homicides in 2009. The same year, Canada had 173. But don’t bring that up.

How come you don’t bring Gun Free Zone Brazil with 40,974 homicides and one-third fewer people? Maybe because it would ruin your narrative? Make you look like a liar?

In Florida, it was against the law — until the law was blocked by a federal judge last summer — for hospital doctors to even ask about firearms ownership of victims, even though gunshot wounds account for 1 in 25 emergency room visits.

Even though the law never blocked a doctor to ask about guns in cases of dire emergency, it seems rather silly to include ER visits in the paragraph. If you are an ER doctor and you cannot figure out what a gun shot wound looks like, you better start a productive career in podiatry soonish.

Conservatives complain about anti-free-speech vigilantes who keep incendiary voices of the right from being heard on college campuses, and they have a valid point. But some of these same First Amendment defenders are the first to smother any talk about the American weapons culture. The gun gag rules.

We smother any talk about guns? How so? Or is it that your version of the First Amendment is that you get to say whatever you want and nobody can disagree with you or even think about voicing an opinion? Just because you write for a paper or are a famous broadcaster or are some sort of celebrity in the latest incarnation of Dancing Like a Fool means you cannot be challenged on what you say? I think you have been operating under the First Amendment Rules For Selected Few playbook which only exists in your mind.

Costas made his brief remarks at halftime of the Sunday night game. Within minutes, the censors went after him.

Censors went after Costas? Really? Is that a new specialty of Homeland Security that we haven’t heard? Was he arrested, thrown in the back of a patrol car and ended up in prison like Pussy Riot in Russia? Was he beaten up, tortured and killed like the journalists covering the Mexican Drug Wars? No, he got a backlash via Twitter and other social media. What kind of wuss chug antidepressants and think about applying for Workman’s Compensation because a post (or a thousand) in Facebook are negative to something he said? For the love of God, put on your Big Boy undies and Man Up! Real journalists are getting killed in the world covering real stories and this two whining idiots are complaining about their feeling being hurt because somebody told them to shut up.

So, to Bob Costas and Timothy Egan: Grow a pair. If you want to play with the big dogs, you cannot pee like a puppy. The era of saying what you wanted to say without having to hear back from your audience died long ago. You must face the fact that everything you write or say in your “official capacity” will be subjected to inspection by millions of editors and fact-checkers.

And the best part is that we won’t even touch a hair of Bob Costas’ toupee to do our jobs.