I've never actually liked the concept of 'comparing apples and apples'. I know what people mean when they say it -- you want to ensure that you're comparing compatible concepts -- but to me, its always made more sense to compare apples and oranges. The differences are obvious -- seeds in the middle, seeds in the fruit; on a tree, on a bush; apple pie, orange...um.
But I like it when you can make comparisons like that. I have to watch out for that, in fact, because I so much like that kind of comparison, I have to be sure that I'm not boiling things down too far. Occams razor cuts both ways.
Years ago, when my wife went to the Million Mom March (I surprised her with a sign in the front yard praising her actions; I liked that she was getting to do something she really wanted to do), I spent some time trying to understand why gun owners are as they are. I'm not a gun owner, and I didn't understand why gun owners were -- and still are, of course -- so vehement about their defense of having guns. When I would see what I thought were perfectly reasonable suggestions -- you have to have certified training before you can have a gun; you have to prove that you lock up the gun; trigger locks -- I would be amazed at the ferocity with which people would say Absolutely Not! Some of them, like Charlton Heston, I could ignore; I figured he's been crazy since Planet of The Apes. But others seemed like reasonable people, and I wanted to understand why they thought as they did.
So, when a group called The Second Amendment Sisters set up shop at the MMM rally, I took note of their web site, and I wrote to them. Got into a series of emails with a woman who strongly believed the the Second Amendment said, by god, exactly what it said -- shall not be abridged, I think the wording is. But she also felt strongly that gun owners have the responsibility to be safe with weapons. We differered on some things, but I got to understand that for some gun owners, at least, it came down to this: gun ownership meant independence and taking responsibility for your own actions. I couldn't agree with the conclusion, but I did agree with the statement, and I was glad I asked. I learned that gun owners can be reasonable, even when I don't agree with where that reason brings them.
Now today's Post says that the question between Bush and Kerry can be capsulized (is that a word?) in the fact that Bush feels vehemently that attacking Iraq meant attacking terrorism, and that you beat terrorism by attacking terrorism, whereas Kerry feels that attacking Iraq meant giving people who were predisposed to become terorists, but hadn't, the rationale to do so; by so doing, we made more terrorists than we stopped.
Black and white. Apples and oranges.
As it happens, I think they're both right.
By attacking Iraq, we did attack a place where terrorists lived and operated, and we made life difficult for them. But we also made life difficult for people who were not terrorists, and we made some of those people willing to cross that line. Attacking was not a good/bad thing; it was a bad thing done with good reason, and with both good and bad results. Bush was not wrong for attacking, but he was wrong for not stopping when it became obvious that the cause was not valid. Kerry is right for saying that we've boosted the likelihood of terrorism, but wrong for saying that this made the original attack wrong.
Apples and oranges are much easier.
2 comments:
This is an interesting post. Regarding the issue of gun controls, I have come to the conclusion that one factor that often plays a role in one's opinions on this particular subject is the part of the country where one grew up.
I have a good friend who grew up in New Jersey, while I grew up in Montana. Surprisingly, our opinions are extremely similar on nearly all political issues except this one.
While I have personally never owned or even fired a gun, I hold many of the same views as the NRA. WHile my opinion has actually shifted a little in recent years, I still pretty much agree with the "shall not be abridged" view.
If you think about it, the years of the "wild, wild west" are not so far distant for some of us. Both sets of my grandparents homesteaded in Montana less than a hundred years ago. In my neighborhood, most households are in possession of several guns. But I trust my neighbors and until a very few years ago, never locked my house.
Because I do listen and understand the views of my friend in New Jersey, I believe I could effectively argue against my own position.
So there you have it. Make of it what you will.
That's unquestionably true. Though I haven't tried to think back to the attitudes of places I've lived -- California, South Dakota, Mississippi, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania -- to try and extract a prevailing 'local theory of gun ownership' (boy, does that sound pretentious), it's certainly true that places where guns are common are much more likely to have people who see nothing wrong, and a great deal right, in having them. I recall being appalled when I first saw a sign on a convenience store in Fort Worth, Texas, to the effect that there were undercover security people working there with the authority to use lethal force, but that played out to be the general concept in Texas -- that it was natural to have and use guns. In Pennsylvania, they don't arm the folks at 7-11, but it is common to have students miss the first Monday after Thanksgiving, because that's the start of hunting season. (Which one, I don't know.) I recall being surprised when the Simpsons did a show which used gun control and responsible gun ownership as a subplot. I would have expected that they would be fiercely anti-gun, but in fact they used Homer to show how responsible gun owners reacted to buffoonish ones. (You can guess which Homer was.) I suppose what I've learned from all of this is that there is nothing inherently wrong with owning guns, which is what I used to think. But we still ask new friends of my daughter if they have guns in the house, and, if so, whether they are secured. So far, we haven't been shot for asking -- and it is a measure of the visceral unease that I still feel with the idea that I can make that joke.
Thank you for writing.
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