They also terrorize, who sit and type

Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu concluded her 6/26 "What defines a terrorist?" with the admonition: "We should consider anyone who gets and carries a gun to be capable of carrying out a mass shooting, whatever you call it."

Of course, a firearm cannot think. It cannot conceive of a crime, nor perpetrate it unilaterally. It is just a dumb object, with no will or self-mobility.

The entire, millions-strong group, "anyone who gets and carries a gun," neither committed crimes nor has offered any call for reasonable suspicion. So to doubt all of its members' characters, by simple virtue of their being in that class, is unfair and illogical.

The use or misuse to which any object, including a gun, is put turns on the choice of the individual in possession of it. Merely having access to a .38 special effects nothing.

But it was never really the inanimate object, the gun, that Basu and her ilk had in their crosshairs, if you'll excuse the phrase. It is the ability to exercise individual choice.

Rheka Basu and the Des Moines Register exert what considerable influence they have to demonize individualism and scare Iowans from conceiving that it just might be acceptable for persons to follow their own drummers and ignore the will of The Community.

Now who's the terrorist?