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Sometimes you can't. I recently had a discussion online with someone who said I was pure evil and the laws under discussion (as well as their enforcement) were also pure evil.
That was their exact phrase: pure evil.
I believe I reasonably responded that if I accept the premise that I'm pure evil then they, of course, are completely right in everything they say. Since I can't accept that premise and the other person viewed it as an unimpeachable fact, I simply informed them that no cogent reply was possible. And that was the end of the conversation.
The disheartening thing about all this is that such a characterization removes the conversation from fact-based to simply articles of faith. The gun control debate then becomes a religious question and, frankly, I learned a long time ago that trying to argue someone out of their religion is a fools errand. I won't do it; it's a waste of everybodys time and energy for no tangible result.
I've been thinking since my last post and your reply seems to reinforce where my brain is tonite. If the need for oppressive gun control is an article of religious faith, maybe there is no solution for swaying the people who believe that way.
Maybe we should accept that.
Maybe we should give up on them and simply look for people who are still open to new ideas or, at least, still willing to listen to logic. Maybe the most efficient use of our time begins with identifying those people to target with our message that civil rights isn't just something that people marched for in the 1960s.
Along those lines, I've always felt that youth outreach is important. It's just too bad that effective youth outreach is so damn inefficient. We can't take every 12-year-old in the country to Hicksville and let them blow up a car with a shot from a rifle. If we could, the movement to destroy our firearms civil rights would be dead in a generation.
I'm still looking for the sweet spot in promoting civil rights where gun ownership is concerned. I'll never give up looking for efficient ways to educate large numbers. But the more I think about it, the more discouraged I become.
