Is it an effigy? Is it a "puppet"? Dude, when it's a likeness of the governor being hoisted by a demonstrator in a minuteman uniform over a crowd of angry gun-toting protesters in the capital, the optics sort of overpower the semantics.

New York NRA-types gathered in Albany today to protest—well, whatever ya got, really. It's a blanket anti-Andrew Cuomo protest, since the governor has attempted to lead the way in a crackdown on assault weapons (with ample loopholes and dubious results). It was slated to include Donald Trump and Carl Paladino, the conservative dark-horse who got his fanny handed to him by Cuomo in the election lo these many years ago.

But according to photos of the protest from New York Daily News Albany bureau chief Ken Lovett, it also included a hung life-size effigy of Cuomo:

Lovett had written previously about how these semi-regular gun rallies had gotten so ornery that even the head of New York's big NRA affiliate expressed reservations about attending. But he did end up coming to the hoedown, presumably in the shadow of the Cuomo effigy hung from a crossbar reading "NEW WORLD ORDER" and bearing a "GET OUT!" sign.

Lovett continued to snap photos of the numerous demonstrators:

Even the geographically and metaphorically challenged ones:

But as he did so, he apparently got an earful from protesters on Twitter who wanted it to be known that Dummy Cuomo was being hoisted in the air by the gun ralliers with the noblest, most respectful intentions!

It's a puppet! See, Cuomo's hung up on the strings of the New World Order that controls him. That's totally different from an effigy, and it's totes not crazy. Now give us our guns!

Hopefully these upright citizens are better shooters than vocabularians, since that is an effigy: The Oxford English Dictionary notes that an effigy is simply "a likeness, portrait or image," generally of a recognizable person, and that in the modern day it generally connotes a likeness used negatively.

Can an effigy be a puppet? Sure. Why not. That makes it all better.

In the protesters' defense, at least they didn't burn Cuomo in effigy— er, in puppet.

(h/t Andrei Berman)