The Gun Debate, You Really Want To Persuade?

In the gun issue, as in almost any sensitive one, there are two essentially radicalized positions with most people not having anything to do with either.  On one side you've got the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, and assorted loons and then on the other you've got Michael Bloomberg, Jesse Jackson, and the Bradys and taken all together about as much stupidity and over-heated rhetoric as I've seen since... well the last time anything touchy came up.

Now look here, if you think that the idea of putting armed guards in every school, church, or other gathering area makes any sense - you've gotten yourself seriously derailed.  If you think you're going to persuade anybody that isn't already all the way over in your corner of the loony bin you've missed your calling as a seller of bridges.  If you think you're going to gain any ground with somebody that knows just even a little bit about firearms by telling them that AR15s are going to shoot down airplanes and stop trains or that Mayor of a place where you can own a firearm if you're rich and/or well-connected but otherwise suck it, well you can have the other corner from Wayne.  That is straight up political calculus.

Most people in the US do not get their knickers in a twist about firearms, one way or the other.  They may look at an incident and think, "wow, that just cannot keep happening," but they don't want Bloomberg's version of reality or LaPierre's.  People who own guns don't want to be shouted at that they're evil any more than non-owners want to be shouted at and called weak-kneed pussies and the ones trying to make up their minds don't want to be called stupid.  That is straight up political calculus.

Wayne LaPierre and his loons and Michael Bloomberg and his loons are not persuadable.  I don't give a damn how many facts and statistics you provide to either group - they are not going to go along with anything other than their pet hobby horse.  You can forget them and for the sake of your sanity you should turn the sound off when either bunch starts up.  You are not going to get reality based anything from them and your thinking is not going to be improved and your decision making will only be impaired.

This is an actually serious issue.  This is not a "you didn't build that" kind of dust-up.  It isn't about semantics and it isn't about what something looks like - it is about fucking carnage and it is about something important enough to be enshrined in the Bill of Rights and stupidity is not a guarantee of anything other than just that - stupid results.  The only reason to have this discussion at all is to do something constructive in regard to a problem and that involves addressing goddam realities.  There are realities regarding who can get guns and how they can get them, there are realities involved in what a particular type of gun is and what it does and why it does that, and I could go on and on and on about just how many things bear on this issue and none of this stupidity has any bearing at all.  I'm sick of it and I'm sick of feeling as though any time I spend on this would be as well spent sitting in the corner sucking on my thumb.

You have a legislative process that is currently being driven by people who are ignorant of the function of a particular firearm proposing to deal with that particular firearm and people whose view of the Second Amendment makes it a suicide pact.  This has got to stop, it has got to be stopped in its tracks.  I agree that this needs to be addressed expeditiously or the populous will move on the the next hare-brained thing our pols get up to and it'll just hang fire and that isn't good enough, but - and this counts - rushing to do any old thing won't do the job, anyhow.

Ammunition capacity is a real thing, access to firearms purchase is a real thing, our war-like culture is a real deal, our mental health disaster is a real thing, the complete unreality around firearms offered up by media is an issue, the ignorance we inculcate in our children is an issue.  We have very real things to deal with and we can do some things short-term and mostly long-term to address these real things.  We do not need to be wasting time playing at people's fantasies.

(Yeah, I know - I'll just go piss into the wind and accomplish just as much)