There are two major issues that collide regarding gun violence and neither presents a good solution. Together they make for an intractable situation. The two parts are the guns and secondly the people who commit violent acts with them.
Yet, there is another side to this crisis. The pandemic offers us a rare opportunity to re-examine our beliefs and the choices we make around them. The situation offers us the opportunity to stretch and grow in ways that might otherwise take years of personal work.
There is nothing new about conspiracy theories. They have been with us for a very long time. Just since the 1960’s we’ve had The Red Menace, the Kennedy assassination, alien spacecraft, black helicopters, Area 51, the faked moon landing, chemtrails, pizzagate and recently the Jewish space laser and QAnon.
There are calls seeking to reconcile the political split in the country. The goal is to use problem solving to ameliorate the conflict. Negotiation is almost always a good idea, with one enormous exception. To negotiate, the real issues must be on the table. And to this point in the discussion, they are not.
On paper, America was founded on the myth of equality, but in practice that has never been the case.