I read your op-ed from yesterday’s Baltimore Sun and sadly was not surprised by this new level that you’re willing to stoop. Fluidly passing blame onto endless dogs that you’ll never know or care to know is nothing new, but trying to tie the rescue community into your attacks by aiming to delegitimize that process in general is no less harsh than any action that you’ve taken since 2007. Readers of your commentary may unfortunately leave with a stronger fear towards shelter dogs and of the process that goes into saving one, and that’s a shame, since wonderful dogs of all breeds are routinely killed in these facilities every year.

Honestly, it was a horrendous thing that happened to your son Dominic. That’s something we can all agree on. Any human being with an ounce of empathy in their body never wants to see another human being hurt, in any fashion, ever. Dog attack or otherwise, most people are fully capable of recognizing a tragedy. What your family experienced was a tragedy on many levels. As a Pit Bull owner myself, I have no reservations with immediately stating as much. I am so sorry that this happened to your family. Truly.

We all want safe communities for everyone–those that we love, those that we know, those that we don’t know. Safety is of the utmost importance to anyone that has a genuine care for people and for animals alike. But with that, my dog is not to blame. And further, pointing out that Dominic’s attacker was a loose dog who was out running at large, which directly correlates to the recklessness of its owner, is not “minimizing” what happened to your child. That’s simply a real and apparent dynamic that sadly allows any individual dog, with whatever level of bad temperament, to act freely and without any level of supervision. To dismiss focus on that is to do a massive disservice to both your community and all of the law-abiding dog owners (of all breeds and types) across the country.

It’s also routinely shocking to me how much you constantly go out of your way to state how so-and-so is not a “dog expert.” May I ask you a question? What then makes you one? You somehow harnessed this energy into a 70-some page e-book that spends much of its space on propagandizing against literally millions of dogs based solely on the way that they look. You’ve also been a central character in passing one of the most egregious and discriminatory pieces of legislation, one that institutes precrime as policy, and yet you are always so quick to eliminate anyone else from the discussion who dare have a differing opinion to yours. Why? Just ironic is all.

Killing millions of dogs that you and you alone deem unsuitable for life on earth will not take back what happened to your son.

Thankfully Dominic is alive, and I wish him nothing but the best. He was a victim of a senseless and preventable incident. I say all of this, even as you are out wishing that my dogs be dead. Even as you are out perpetuating stereotypes that will surely result in the further abandonment and mistreatment of these dogs. Even as you are out trying to create precedent for taking away housing, and for relentlessly fear-mongering behind the notion of liability. And lastly, even as roaming dogs, chained and tethered dogs, and the non-supervision of children are consistently the common denominators in almost every single dog-related fatality that you can pull up from any random calendar year.

I’d argue that from a “public safety” standpoint the covering up of that information, the ignoring of it (both the information and the reckless owners themselves), is the biggest crime of all.

Those paying attention know that your vague and all-encompassing language is cheered and reprinted by individuals like Colleen Lynn, head representative of DogsBite.org, a website that poses as a balanced public safety resource but in reality is nothing more than a Pit Bull hate group. You even noted her, and her evidence-free “stats,” in your op-ed. Ms. Lynn had a 2007 incident with a “Pit Bull” in Seattle, one whose details she keeps revising over time, and has been on a crusade to vilify them into extermination ever since. If that’s what you call a “rational” and “reputable” source for anything then we undoubtedly read from different dictionaries.

Fortunately the truth will always shine through, and further, the truth will repeatedly lay waste to those aiming to criminalize millions of completely innocent dogs, or groups of anything else, who have been generically and unfairly deemed to universally fit some negative connotation as a whole. That is fundamentally wrong on every level. People are individuals, and so are dogs. If you treat them in the opposite ways then you not only discriminate wildly but also resoundingly fail to even attempt to address the problems associated with the individual incidents or “attacks” that have jump-started these debates in the first place.

Truth is that dogs are incredibly safe. Truth is that there are 72+ million of them in this country alone. Truth is that there is well over 300 million people in this same country. Think about how many daily interactions that creates. No, seriously. Take a moment. Dogs are incredibly safe. Pit Bulls are dogs. Throw whatever cherry-picked, unverified, media-reported statistic out at me that you want… 99.9999999999999% of all dogs, of all Pit Bulls, and no matter the breakdown–by breed or type or city or county or state–have never done anything to anyone. That is a stat that you cannot refute. And if you continue trying to make monsters out of these individual creatures, dogs that you have no business in the world speaking on (for many reasons, one being that you’ve never met them), well, it just solidifies the utter fact that you are fusing your life’s work and energy towards adding to the wrong side of history. That is not exactly something to be proud of.