Gun-owning journalist dares 'laughingstock' Dana Loesch to back up her NRA 'bullsh*t': 'You don’t have the guts'

Author and journalist Linda Tirado challenged Dana Loesch to back up her threats against people in her line of work -- but she warned that she's as skilled with guns as the NRA spokeswoman claims to be.

Tirado, the author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America and the viral essay "This Is Why Poor People's Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense," called out Loesch as a phony and a "shill" who's making America worse in a devastating Daily Beast article.

"You don’t scare me, and nor do your crazed fans," Tirado wrote. "You’re real used to being the armed one in a conversation, and that’s a reasonable assumption. Most journalists who call out your bullsh*t aren’t gun owners. Nor are they from an NRA family. Most journalists don’t live near the holler. Most of us didn’t come from the bottom. But I am, and I do, and I did."

"I’m not afraid of you, or your single percent of the population, or the money of the people who pay you, or your clenched fists," she added.

She mocked Loesch as a racist "ghoul" and a "laughingstock," and she dared her to back up her "posturing and empty rhetoric" in NRA TV videos encouraging violence against journalists.

"Let me answer your most recent 'ad' quite directly: Come for me. No, really," Tirado said. "Are you not just a shill? Do you believe the words you are happy to say, or is it just the paycheck that keeps you on air? You said my time was running out, and as far as science is concerned your hourglass is finite. I’m waiting for you, since you issued your vague challenge. Maybe that’s another difference between where we come from; in my mountains we don’t issue ultimatums we don’t mean to follow up on. It would be a sign of weakness to issue an empty threat."

"Because I live in this world you have helped to create, I should be very clear here that I make no threat," Tirado added. "I just don’t think you have the guts to follow through on yours, even should you search the darkest corners of your stunted mind and shriveled soul and find a shred of intellectual consistency."

She told Loesch that she had sold her soul to the NRA for nothing, because the Parkland teens she insulted would eventually destroy the "dystopia" she helped create.

"When you are old, you will consider your life and find it ash in your mouth while you watch today’s children systematically undoing your life’s work," Tirado wrote. "They don’t fear you any more than I do, and they will win."