Loose lips sink ships! Hitler is listening!

Almost eighty years ago our parents, grandparents, even some great-grandparents for young people, heard those words and took heed. During WWII, they knew spreading irresponsible rumors just to play into their drama-queen impulses could kill men in the field.

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Well, the president says we’re virtually in wartime. The enemy is invisible and lethal. The best way to fight it is to stay calm and do what we must do to, as has been said in the UK, “blunt the sombrero.”

One thing that will not help in that effort is people spreading all types of wacky conspiracy theories and rumors, much of it over social media.

This specifically goes for guns. No one, except the usual suspects who were talking about it before the virus, is coming for your guns. The Second Amendment has not been —and will not be— suspended. If you are saying this over any platform you are (using a WWII comparison) sinking ships striving to bring vital supplies to the battlefront.

Get a grip, cupcake. Look, we know that in a dramatic time people want to be in on the intensity. They want to take part in the wartime tendency to give in to passionate responses to historic events. Nobody wants to be on the sidelines. In some instances that is well and good.

But if that takes the form of trying to seem in the know, and thus somehow elite, by taking their own biases and fears and spreading them like, well, like a virus, then you could be harming people in the field fighting against this insidious menace.

So much of this, especially the economic aspect, depends on the psychology of the nation. If people think things are going badly they will act like that, invest like that, spread rumors like that. Then guess what? Things will go badly. It becomes a cycle of rumor, effect, more rumor, and subsequently worse effect.

This is not mature. Hell, this is not American. We are a strong people, a tough people not traditionally prone to hysteria or overstatement. The strong and silent type is not an American icon for nothing. Yes, the counterculture has made screaming meemies —those who find victim and drama queen status desirable— out of some of us.

But not out of the best of us. Those Americans, like you, can think and trust reliable sources and empirical evidence. You will not spread rumors of martial law, gun confiscation, or Martian landings. You know better.