Steve Deace: After Orlando, We Should be Asking this One Question

Source: Conservative Review | June 13, 2016 | Steve Deace

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It’s almost as if we’re becoming numb to them, too. Like we should have a permanent hot take saved in each of our social media accounts that we can just immediately repost after each one. Sort of like a “thoughts and prayers (fill in the blank)” status update. Man’s inhumanity to man fires off a round or several, and America’s Clockwork Orange is wound up and raring to go with talking points at the ready.

And I confess I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else.

Yet there was something different about this Orlando nightclub shooting for me. It weighed on me. My heart was heavy. I decided to take most of Sunday away from media and think/pray on it longer than I typically would a story that dominates the news cycle like this, when the pressure is on to be heard while everyone is listening.

But are they?

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These seem to be arguments made without actually having an argument. You come here to CR if you share my arguments. Maybe Huffington Post or Salon if you prefer the other side’s. But every time this happens we re-rack our arguments from the last one, slay our straw men, and each of us in the punditry dutifully plays one of the usual suspects.

We need something more than this. We need to talk to each other. Not at each other.

Thus, I began to contemplate this non-debate debate from a broader perspective, and a question popped into my head: What does the average American think about these tragedies?

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It seems as if there’s a great, big world out there that doesn’t care what we think.

So just how does that great, big world react to America’s tragedy culture when it’s forced to gaze into our corner of the snow globe? Largely unchurched, and largely unattached to either side’s zeitgeist, I’d imagine it probably asks the following two questions quite a bit:

1)    How in the world is our government able to trace the last lineage of Mad Cow Disease, but unable to stop crazy people from getting guns?

2)    Why do we allow people into the country, or let people stay, who make it obvious they hate us and mean to do us harm?

These are people either unaware of our founding traditions, and/or think those ideas cannot capably serve these modern times as well as more progressive ones can. They don’t care about our pet causes. They just want solutions.

For example, I’d imagine it doesn’t make much sense to them why our president is able to point the blame at the gun but not the ideology of the shooter who pulled the trigger. Likewise, they probably don’t understand why all these “law and order” Republicans oppose efforts to deny gun purchases to those on terrorist watch lists.

Of course, each side here has nuances that explain its positions to their satisfaction of consciences. And I’m not here to argue the merits of either at this time, as much as I am here to point out that yet again in this debate we too often seek to serve our side’s narrative. Not serve up real solutions to the American people.

This is a bigger debate than entitlements, tariffs, taxes and regulations. At least it should be, for this deals with life and death in the here and now. I’m guessing most of the victims in that Florida nightclub don’t vote the same way I do, yet my heart breaks for them and their families nonetheless. There must be some – pardon the expression – safe spaces for us to still come now, and reason together as a unified culture. And if these terrible, horrific and seemingly ubiquitous tragedies aren’t the catalyst for that peace talk, then we are clearly doomed as a people.

Therefore, here’s my big idea.

Instead of having an argument, I suggest we actually start one.

It’s time to have a national conversation about what is happening in our culture, and nothing should be off limits for fear of offending either side’s cherished constituencies. If progressives are confident their secularization and political correctness isn’t watering down our nation’s values and leaving us more vulnerable to evil, then they shouldn’t be threatened by viewpoints to the contrary. Similarly, if we conservatives are confident that what the Left likes to describe as “America’s gun culture” isn’t the issue, and the Second Amendment is still rightly defined to include the 21st century marksman’s arsenal, then neither should we.

Let’s have a series of real town halls and debates. With professional (not hackneyed) advocates for both sides taking part in moderating them in order to make sure each side is adequately cross examined.

Who knows, maybe if we talk to each other as adults for a change we might actually find some common ground? For the parents laying their dead child to rest mourn just the same, regardless of whether they’re Democrats or Republicans.

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