The gun nuts on Twitter are very angry with me.

An actual tweet from a gun nut. Seriously.

I’ve been waiting for something of mine to go viral, and it happened today on Twitter.  The gun nuts are not pleased with my column on the Michigan school shooting.  What’s got them all worked up?  Well, my use of the words “military grade” in a tweet, which read:  “It cost $499.99 to kill four kids in Oxford, Michigan this week. That's how much a father paid for this military-grade Sig Sauer SP2022 when he bought it for his son, a 15 year old boy, who did the shooting.”

I described the gun used to kill four students and wound seven on Wednesday of this week as military grade because it is.  It’s an expensive piece of machinery made by one of the top weapons manufacturers in the world, and as I pointed out in the column, a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol made by Sig Sauer very similar to it was bought by the Department of Defense for use by all four military services in this country.  As it turns out, DOD bought a number of SP2022 pistols for use by special operations troops as well.

The gun nuts jumped all over me for calling it military grade not because it isn’t military grade, which it is, but because I used a term which they see as proving my amateurism when it comes to firearms. 

“Why is everything military grade to these people? The closest some of them have been to the military is watching them march in a parade!” tweeted a home-grown gun expert who apparently couldn’t find the button on his computer for Google. “I saw a military grade SUV mow down 50+ people in Wisconsin,” someone else joked.  That one was retweeted more than 100 times.  “Salon:  This is exactly why we laugh at you,” because I’m apparently such a dufus when it comes to guns.

My column wasn’t a gun-magazine review of the pistol used to kill and wound high school children in Michigan.  The column was about the extraordinary irresponsibility of the shooter’s parents, who bought an expensive high-powered firearm and a whole bunch of ammunition for their 15 year old son who they knew to be troubled and contemplating violence.  With four teenagers lying dead in a morgue in Oxford, Michigan, and seven others in hospitals, all these fools on Twitter can do is beat their chests that I exposed my alleged lack of firearms expertise with the use of the words, military grade.

I was military grade the day I was born in a field hospital in Fukuowka, Japan to an Infantry First Lieutenant father and a Red Cross girl mother, and driven home to our military quarters in occupied Japan in a Jeep wrapped in a GI blanket.  My father was armed at the time with his Army-issue M1911 Colt .45.  My mother held his Army-issue Winchester Carbine between her legs and me in her arms.  The U.S. Army of Occupation was still having trouble with diehard Japanese snipers and squads of former Japanese soldiers operating as bandits at the time.

I think I recall having picked up a few things about the responsible use of firearms along the way.