You are right, but I think you way underestimate the way personal experience shapes one. I am very, very different than my parents and live a life very different from those in the neighborhood I was raised but that journey was extremely difficult for me. I look back on it now, and it all seems so obvious that it’s difficult for me to understand why I made it so hard to get here, but we forget what it’s like to be raised in a monolithic environment. Even when we are open minded, curious and well read it is very hard to reach practical conclusions about “the other” (rural/urban, black/white, WASP/foreign, Christian/Atheist/Muslim/Jewish…) without some experience living among and around that which we don’t understand.

The gun reasoning didn’t wash for me, it proposes that people’s views are only shaped by their personal experiences. That people are unable to view the bigger picture and factor that into their reasoning.

All anti-gun views are purely political in nature. Urban folks have been convinced guns are the problem,when it’s really the conditions they allow to have grown and fester in their communities.

If the war goes better through 06, they aren’t even in contention this time around.

“…Embrace the politics of division at your peril. Lob the culture war grenades, and the independents and moderates—the majority of our populace—will run away from the percussion, not toward it…”