Friday, January 26, 2018

Damn. Seriously. We can do this shit...

In our overly mediated world, a moment of profound reason using an old style form of communication that has been minimized in favor of--well, all the crap in our cell phones that steal our attention away from the world.
This happened. It can happen again. 
Small town Kentucky cop overseeing drug interdiction—I had to look that word up, it means interception—in a conversation with the New York liberal about gun regulations (that would be me). He didn’t want the regulations. I suggested some laws restricting certain guns would be good. A respectful exchange of ideas.
He made many good points about gun ownership being an important right to protect.
He said Democrats and liberals are out to take people’s guns away. I explained that in my time in Iowa working with various party platform committees not one person ever even hinted at the idea of taking people’s guns. Regulation of future gun sales. Yes. Taking a single gun away. Never. He accepted my word on that. He said he thought he could trust me. 
He said that laws limiting certain types of guns would not change anything today or tomorrow. I said he was absolutely right. But ten, twenty, fifty years from now, those laws might stop someone from getting access to a gun. Might stop a shooting at a high school. He said he never thought of it that way. He accepted my point. We agreed. 
Conversation. Not an exchange of memes, not an exchange of insults. 
It is meaningful that not long after this conversation there was another school shooting.  More dead kids.
Conversation. Finding the middle ground where truth usually resides.