this is exactly my point. Anytime anyone even hints at doing something about guns, people go nuts. No rational argument is even allowed. More and more death threat youtube vids appear.
I'll take a page from your book and froth at the mouth at a mere mention.
However, I'm not surprised u can't see the irony. It's hard to notice such things when you're in a rage.
There are relatively intelligent people who are amenable to rational argument on either side of the aisle, but they tend to be at the upper echelons of power or a part of auxiliary structures, e.g., think tanks that analyze and propose policy. (Unfortunately, it's still the case that an increasing amount of such elites are polarized, partisan types.)
It isn't reasonable to expect the general population to be calm, rational, and amenable to relatively emotion-free discourse. I think the ability to hold sophisticated, productive conversations about such issues requires training and a level of knowledge not accessible to most of the population (generally speaking, a college education seems necessary, something only one-fourth of the nation receives). And this is what we'd expect, really: our lowly origins as half-evolved apes makes the possibility of such discourse a wonder in itself; not understanding the complex causal chains of economic policy, as a random example, is nothing to be ashamed of (arguably, not even the experts understand).
The only problem with the way things are is that apparently, elites need to use emotional appeals to convince a population that make-believes it understands the issues. Will further education make policy debates more accessible, or will elites need to keep leading most people on?
