In the late 1780s, as the framers were in the process of pushing the US constitution towards ratification, one of the main criticisms was: "It's a bundle of comprise".
A lot of people were unhappy because they wouldn't be getting their way on their favorite issues.
We don't need to wonder why there's a tendency for the kind of bullheaded tribal devotion to one side or the other in politics. It's embedded in the human firmware.
The point of the American Experiment was (is) to elevate compromise; to make compromise itself - and thus the ability to reach a positive outcome through compromise - a worthy and admirable alternative to bashing each other over the head with sticks and rocks.
There can be no more representative issue to illustrate that point than the Gun Debate.
Look at any given comments section online where the topic is Guns and Gun Control and 2nd amendment and dead kids etc etc. I've lost count of the times I could easily draw the inference that a commenter intended to back up his position with violence in order to prove his point - or his manhood, or some other fucked up thing rattling around in his vacuum-packed skull.
Weirdly, "conservatives" have it right - we've got a serious cultural problem. But the roots of that problem have very little to do with video games or hip-hop or lack of prayer or any of the other bugbears the right radicals love to pimp at us. Those are all reflections of our culture - they're symptoms, not causes.
I won't try to lay the blame at the feet of the US military (fake lord knows it's a whole fucktangle of weird shit), but think about the simple fact that we've got millions of kids who have grown up never knowing a single day in their entire lives when the US wasn't at war.
Now look at the cops they've grown accustomed to seeing.
And their dads, brothers, uncles, cousins and neighbors.
We've all but abandoned 'soft power', and made the decision to leave everything up to the military and the cops.
We send troops in to handle whatever we think is wrong in foreign countries, and we call the cops every time we think there might be a problem with somebody in the park or the grocery store or down the block from us.
We've come to fully expect that whatever the problem is, we can simply kill our way out of it.
WaPo - Howell Raines
September 1, 2019
As a hunter who has owned firearms since adolescence without breaking any laws or feeling under-gunned, I think I am equipped to offer a modest proposal that could produce a safer America and also break the maniacal hold of the National Rifle Association on the nation’s recreational shooters, not to mention Congress.
My proposal is simply that we revert to the gun laws that prevailed in the United States around 1960. From a public-safety standpoint, that was far from a perfect world. The cheap revolvers called “Saturday night specials” ruled the night in many cities. Loopholes as to the sale and registration of long arms allowed the importation of the mail-order rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Yet law-abiding hunters and target shooters had all the weapons and firepower they needed and were not in a state of constant turmoil over state and federal laws that restricted most shotguns to three rounds and most semiautomatic rifles and handguns to fewer than 20 rounds. American gun and ammunition manufacturers such as Remington, Winchester and Colt were thriving. Nobody argued that a six-shot revolver was inadequate for home-protection emergencies. Deer and elk hunters who used larger caliber rifles felt amply equipped with standard magazines of a half-dozen or so shells.
A return to these basic restrictions on loadings would appeal to most hunters, firing-range shooters and gun collectors who battle the nonstop whirlpool of NRA paranoia. It would give members of Congress, including those from rural, pro-gun states, a sellable policy with a history of limiting mass shootings in public places while protecting the sporting and self-protection practices of law-abiding citizens. And it would reduce the body count from shootings in public places.
I'm not saying we should yearn for some romantic fantasy of the pastoral days of yore. But I insist that we look at what was working for us before we removed all restraints and allowed private interests to install wholly owned coin-operated politicians in such openly crass ways.
This ends in plutocracy, which in turn eventually ends in bloody revolt - just exactly the way it did in 18th-century America.
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