When a Muslim commits a terrorist act, killing innocent people, a chorus of voices quickly arises to admonish us that most Muslims (“the vast majority” is the preferred phrase) are peaceful and oppose murder in the name of their religion.  The dereliction of one or a few believers should not cause us to cast blame on all Muslims.

Those same voices speak the same message when, for example, an illegal immigrant murders.  Don’t blame all illegal immigrants, they say; most are peaceful and law-abiding and want only to contribute to society.

I agree without reservation.  This is the only fair and just attitude for reasonable people to take.  An entire group should not be condemned or blamed when one of its members commits a crime, no matter how horrible that crime is.  Evil exists among us, but no group of people should be unfairly libeled or defined by the actions of one of its own who gives in to evil, against the wishes and temperaments of the others.

But this just and enlightened concession is not granted to one large group of people: the National Rifle Association.  Instead, after every mass shooting, the NRA, in toto, is quickly and angrily blamed and condemned, even when the murderer was not a member of the NRA (and none have been), and when the NRA itself condemns the act.

In just the last few months, following the school shootings in Florida and Texas, prominent voices on television news and talk shows, in newspapers, on social media and the Internet, have called us terrorists (that’s their favorite slander), Nazis, child murderers, racists, enemies and other epithets; a few of the most extreme even call for killing us.  We are cursed and reviled at public marches and demonstrations.

It takes only minutes of searching the Internet to find examples of this, so numerous that I was overwhelmed by them.  I selected a small sample for the video that I created to provide evidence of what I claim.

Never mind that the murderers were not one of us; they were teenagers who the NRA argues should not have had guns (Cruz in Florida should have been – could have been – restricted for mental problems; the school, sheriff’s department and the FBI had evidence and cause to stop him from passing a NICS background check, but they did not do so).  Never mind that our hearts break, too, when such tragedies happen.  Never mind that we desire just as much to find ways to stop such evil from happening again, even if our solutions differ from those who hate us.

Six million innocent people (a group almost twice as large as the Muslim population of the U.S.) who band together to advocate for a constitutional civil right for law-abiding citizens, are nonetheless cast as the first and foremost villain.  If the hate and anger were not so vehement, it would almost be funny: me, a rather quiet, middle-aged man with not a single crime to my name, possessing more cats than guns and who picks up June bugs off the driveway so they don’t get crushed, an ardent civil libertarian whose childhood heroes were Dr. Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln….I am a racist, Nazi terrorist!

But it isn’t funny.  Nor is it just or fair or decent.  It is an angry, irrational mob frenzy of hatred directed at millions of innocent Americans who do not deserve it.  It is, quite simply, discrimination.  Perhaps most importantly, it is foolishly counter-productive.  Call us such names often enough, and even the quiet, middle-aged NRA members like myself will finally be so offended by such slander that we will see little reason for cooperation and compromise.

We may be at that point already.