Cara McDonough:

I ended my story by saying that I felt the only way to move forward in this debate was to talk to people who did get the gun thing. That I wanted to understand the other side because, truthfully, I’d never tried to before.

A handful of gun owners — individuals with political views very different from my own — apparently read all the way through. They got the sentiment and took me up on my request and wrote to me. Because I’d prompted the discussion, I realized I needed to follow through, so I wrote back. And we’ve been talking.

I’m not claiming that I’ve begun some sort of revolution. The back-and-forth is slow going, but we’re communicating. In some instances, the conversation has remained focused on gun policy, while other email threads have morphed into discussing personal life beyond the issue at hand.

Writing to gun owners humanized the issue for me. After feeling so hopeless, the emails made me feel better. They were the only thing that did. Talking to people who owned guns and were willing to discuss that with me in a reasonable and respectful way had some immediate, and surprising, results.

I began to get “the gun thing,” as I’d dismissively termed it. A few who wrote to me pointed out that when you live in a rural community and calling law enforcement does not necessarily result in a prompt response, owning a gun for personal safety seems prudent. I’m a product of East Coast city life and — naively, shortsightedly — had never considered this.

But here’s the thing, Cara.  You never really advocated or even intended to advocate disarming everyone.  You never really believed in gun control for everyone, because you didn’t advocate disarming cops.  That’s a problem.  That means that you believe in guns, just in what you consider “the right hands.”  You want the government to have a monopoly of force, and for others to be left defenseless against criminals and, yes, against their own government as well.

The example you cited about people in the countryside is shameful, and not only should you never have brought that up, your detractors should have kept their mouths shut because they don’t believe in gun rights either.  Gun rights are just that – rights.  They are no respecter of persons or location.  Urbanites need self defense just as much as rural folk.

As for the cops you assume would be there is you call them, you do understand that they are under no legal obligation to protect you, don’t you?  Not according to Warren v. D.C., Castle Rock v. Gonzales, and other decisions.  Legally, the police can wait until your neighbors smell your rotting corpse before sending in the medical examiner, while they go eat doughnuts.  Besides, given typical response times, the crimes are over by the time police respond.

On a larger scale, guns protect men and women from awful people like ISIS, who get off on beheading defenseless women and children, or the Taliban, who want to perpetrate female circumcision and destroy school books so that children can’t learn to read.  Guns enabled our own revolution against a tyrant in England, and guns ended Hitler’s reign of terror in Europe.

You see, you know that guns are a tool with magnificent utility, an equalizer of the evil and the innocent, of the  criminal and the righteous.  But you still want the innocent and the righteous to be defenseless, and that says something deeply troubling about your values.  I suggest a deep, quiet period of soul-searching before writing about this again.

And before you do write again, you should get up with someone like me, who can sit for several hours and show you how our side safely handles firearms, and how they can be safely deployed at the gun range.  It simply isn’t enough to write emails back and forth.  You aren’t really fully engaged in this issue yet.  You’re just nibbling around the edges.