I must say now, that i am a bit of a closet political moderate. I find myself in the middle of the fence about a lot of the issues but i tend to lean a little more to the right in my opinions. I choose to be on the fence because it allows me to be less narrow-minded (note that i said less). If you find yourself in the middle of the fence, having different opinions about various political issues, things are no longer black and white which is where a lot of the issues with modern politics spring issues. All debates happen because the extremes on both sides refuse to see the 10-million shades of grey that would satisfy everyone would they be willing to give an inch (both sides mind you).
So with that being said, i would like to carry on with my little story today. The other day i was checking my facebook page when one of my friends, famous to me for asking very controversial questions in a very unbiased way in order to not incite a riot on his status's posted a question about gun laws. He just wanted to know what everyone's opinions were on firearm laws.
There were a few participants before i joined in, you had people from all over the place, people who believed there should be no gun control because of the stereotypical totalitarian overlord argument. We had people who said there should be more but it was just impossible because of NRA's lobby strength, and you had others even yet who said there should be more and it's possible to do more.
I am not a firm believer in GUN control myself. I don't want our firearms being controlled because i use them for home defense and if some wild and crazy gun control law goes through before i turn 21, i really don't want to do 100 extra hoops just to get my handgun. I do, however, believe in civil control. Let me explain before you get exasperated and angry.
What i mean by Civil Control is this: instead of trying to regulate the firearms, let's try to apply a relatively unobtrusive method of seeing whether the person in question is mentally stable enough to own a firearm responsibly. This unobtrusive method would be the implementation of a Psyche Evaluation to all prospective gun owners. This evaluation would stay on your record for 3-6 years, and if you wanted to purchase more firearms after that set period of time, you would have to go spend the 2 hours to get it renewed. It wouldn't be very cumbersome and it would restrict the number of clinically psycho, and mentally unstable people who can walk into wal-mart, buy a 12-gauge and then kill everyone in the hospital across the street with it.
So i went ahead and posted this as such to the status, and the first responder, the one who said there should be no firearm controls started lashing back at me with some anecdotes about how I can't judge who is mentally stable and who isn't and how I can't say who can buy guns and who can't. The argument went on for a good hour and it finally got down to the point where she was running out of arguments for me to shoot down, so she started putting words in my mouth. Now folks, if there's one thing i hate more than hypocrisy it's people putting words in my mouth.
So i went ahead and whipped her into shape by shooting down all the false arguments she conjured and then told her she needed to stop putting words in my mouth. She vanished from the status, haven't seen her since, c'est la vie.
Later that night i was talking to my dad, an Extreme Righter and proud of it, and was telling him about this little incident. I was very vague about what went down and who was on which side. I simply said that i had gotten into an argument about gun control with someone one online, i said this, this and this and they started putting words in my mouth so i shot them down and said "but really, tell me more about how you like to put words in my mouth." that's all i told my father.
The first words out of his mouth were "typical liberal..." referring to the lady i shot down. Which is ironic because she was of the same political orientation as him. This raised an interesting thought. Both political extremist parties strongly believe that they are right, and everyone else is wrong and that no one from their party could ever do anything wrong. Just physically can't happen with their party; it would tear a hole in the fabric of space. Which just goes to show the narrow-mindedness and the bigotry that goes along with this whole thing. without giving away party affiliations or actual arguments he instantly made the connection to the party opposite of his. Now i'm not saying what he says is false, but it's equally true about the extreme right as it is about the extreme left.
So why are we like that? why is it that we insist on those points of view as a society? it's because everyone is so god damned narrow minded these days. There is no such thing as gray to these political extremists. both of them say "it's my way or the highway" and none of them ever budge which causes this huge turmoil and strife when it comes down to anything political. You know what would do our country a world of good? is if both parties grew some balls and some tolerance and gave each other some wiggle room instead of just headlocking each other trying to kill them off. I mean seriously, think about this. Would abortion be that big of a deal if people were to find some middle ground peacefully? The right doesn't want it legal at all, the left wants to abort a child in the third trimester, let them abort by the 4th or 5th month and have them pay for half of it if they chose to do it. Is it really that unreasonable to say "If you're still pregnant half way through the gestation period, you're probably planning on keeping the child?"
Go ahead and post your responses in the comments section below.
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