What strikes me the most when I see people talking politics on Facebook and elsewhere is how polarized everyone seems to be. I say seems, because we often put things online that are less nuanced than what we might say directly to our friends in person. We post memes and the like that tend to be fairly black and white in what they express, when the reality is most issues are quite gray.
Take gun control, for instance. The clear answer, in my opinion, is not utter and complete unregulated freedom to purchase and use any kind of weapon at all, nor is it to ban them completely. I support the second amendment of the constitution here in the US, but not without some regulation.
In fact, I support quite a bit of regulation. It should be as difficult to get a license to own a gun (and ownership should be licensed everywhere, no exceptions) as it is to get a license to own a car, which, granted, is not really that difficult, but you should be required to undergo training, background checks, obtain insurance and then re-up, so to speak, every couple of years, in order to keep that license, just like you have to do to keep driving (except for the background checks, of course). Also, if you commit a violent crime with a gun, you can never own one legally again and will be severely punished if caught in possession of one.
It would not be burdensome, at least, no more so than keeping a driver’s license and I don’t hear anyone complaining about that. Nor about having to have insurance in order to register the car. Guns should be exactly the same. It will cut down on ownership overall, which can only be a good thing, because guess where the bad guys get their guns? They’re probably not getting them from Mexico, that’s for sure.
Most stolen guns obtained by criminals were stolen from legal gun owners right here in this country. Which makes you wonder why they have the gun in the first place, since the idea is that owning a gun is supposed to deter crime, right? Having that gun in your house is supposed to make the criminal think twice, right? Except it doesn’t. It’s just one more thing for them to steal.
Then there’s the idea that a “bad guy with a gun can only be stopped by a good guy with a gun” which is technically true, if the good guy is a fully trained police officer. When you think about it, especially about open carry, how do you tell a good guy practicing legal open carry from a bad guy practicing legal open carry? Guess what? You can’t. At least, not until the bad guy opens fire. And then it’s too late. Even if he’s gunned down by a good guy, chances are he’ll have hurt or killed someone before that point, so then the good guy failed. Good guys with guns can’t stop bad guys before they know they’re bad guys, and by the time they do know they’re bad guys, it’s too late.
So all of this I just talked about is just to illustrate that my position is not absolute, although it’s definitely more on the progressive side of things in terms of gun control. But I’m still not advocating a complete ban of all guns. You’d never know that, though, if I posted this on Facebook and watched the response from my more conservative friends. They’d say I was all for completely banning gun ownership, even though clearly I’m not.
It’s the nature of the debate now-a-days, as you can see. Pretty much no matter the issue, it’s framed as absolutely black and white, when it’s really gray. I wish there was a way to get people to see that, and to realize that compromising when it comes to finding solutions to the craziness that seems to happen more and more often is not a bad thing.
But that’s a discussion for a future post.
Singing Meat 