Compromise Should Call the Shots

It's a whole new world out there. A fresh rain has washed all the soiled PAC money off the streets into the gutter where it belongs. The American electorate has once again cut through the ideologues' rhetoric to weed out the gasbags and constipated bloviators. The woof and stomp drum beat of the tragically off-track, out-of-touch Tea Party silliness has been given the boot for at least four years when the burrowing insects will emerge once again to plague the democratic process.

There, that was fun. I wish it was that clear cut. Like dogs yapping at the wheels of progress (what an image), we will continue to have skulkers loping along bleating doomsday forecasts, claiming election fraud, rubbing dirt into their hair and rending their garments. In the halls of the National Rifle Association PAC, we can imagine lamp cord nooses being fastened to light fixtures above teetering chairs atop tables, and bereft ideologues imploring their Conservative gods for a sign that this betrayal is all part of some mystical plan in the coming post-apocalyptic world. Or maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe some closet moderate might propose that the question of America's firearms tradition will be better served if the hierarchy in their fused vertebrae rigidity, peering out at the real world of shooting sports and our gun culture considers exploring...compromise. Of course the
"C-word" requires at least two parties. Those ultra-liberals perched on the lofty heights of moral righteousness who hide behind pages of slippery statistics and employ the same tactics to remove guns from the American populace as did their predecessors who championed Prohibition and the 18th Amendment have to pull a chair up to the table.

The tradition of firearms ownership and shooting sports should not be the ideological playground of  blustering patriotic bullies, nor the dry and barren desert of sweaty-palm statistic jugglers. There is a middle ground that removes the stigma and celebrates the accomplishments of shooting sports while abstracting the concept of "weapons" for their narrow and necessary applications. Give the C-word a chance and take the majority of American sportsmen and women off the hook.