When comedian Alison Leiby tweeted a pretty cute, common sense joke in December, she had no idea how violent the repercussions would be. Conservative extremists have been sending her threats of rape and death every since.On December 16 2015, Leiby tweeted her 10,000 followers a fairly straightforward gag:As a woman, I just hope that one day I have as many rights as a gun does.  Alison Leiby (@AlisonLeiby) December 17, 2015Leiby describes what happened next in a piece for Medium:Somewhere along the way an account with a large and conservative following retweeted it, an action that flooded my notifications page with people calling me  stupid  or a  moron  or, one of my personal favorites, a  retarded liberal.  Fine.Last Monday evening, however, the replies went from annoying and insulting to violent and threatening. Men were replying to me and taking my joke to a horrific, new place. Some said they wanted to ban me from public places and silence me. Others said they wanted to lock me in their closet when they re done with me. A few choice gentlemen suggested I, like their gun, have a  rough brush clean my holes. She is not exaggerating the backlash. Even by the darkest depths of Twitter standards, it makes truly grim reading. We won t give the losers the honor of the airtime here but you can check out the twitter conversation for yourself by clicking on the original tweet above.Obviously, this reaction is hyper-hypocritical from people who present the case for their guns as a freedom and liberty issue. If they want the right to bear arms, doesn t Leiby have the right to free speech? It s not like they have to read what she writes. They made a choice to read it. As she points out, If you don t like the taste of fish, you wouldn t go to a restaurant, order the trout, and then call the chef a stupid bitch for serving it to you. So why do people do it on the Internet? Misogyny is not a joke. It is not some hobby horse that  angry women  ride around to piss men off. It killed 18,000American women in the last 12 years. This means that more women have been killed at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends since 9/11, than Americans died during 9/11, and in all terror attacks and wars since.In a 2005 study, yet to be repeated, a leading cause of death among pregnant American woman was homicide by their male partner or ex. Only pregnancy-related complications ranked higher.This is a crisis. A crisis which Leiby came at from about the least offensive, lightest way possible. Yet she faced the united, violent reaction of the very same men who likely commit and defend these crimes. Their intention? To stop women from raising these issues in the public space. So we need to keep raising these issues, defiantly and relentlessly, until the day they are consigned to the dustbin of history   which is the only place they belong. Featured image from Twitter