A Conversation...

Last night I was chatting with several friends and someone brought up the Colorado shooting.  A friend in Phoenix said that he had been planning to go see the movie but heard that the police were searching everyone at the theater and didn't want to deal with that.  I wondered what they hoped to accomplish, given that it's Arizona and probably not illegal to carry a gun into a theater, at which point someone else said, "Why would you need to bring a gun to a theater anyway?"

...

Really?  We're sitting here talking about some crazy guy who went on a mass shooting spree in a theater and you can still ask that question?

We spend so much time with like-minded people - which is natural, of course - that hearing things like that is sometimes like a bucket of cold water to the face.  We've thought about these issues in depth, we've come to our decisions.  On the other side, the anti-gunners have also thought about these issues and come to their decisions.  But there are a great many people in the middle who haven't really thought about these things.  They pop out whatever line they've heard from other people without really thinking through the implications.  These are the people we hope to - and need to - reach.  We all know that we'll never in a million years change the minds of Japete and her like.  These people though, the ones without an opinion, or the ones only mildly in either direction, those are the people we can reach.