A Few Simple Truths

(at omnivore)

I will, indeed, have much more to say about The Mayor’s Student Tax — so many people keep saying so many silly things, it’s almost impossible to keep up — as the week unfolds. But this morning, before I head out for a little Veteran’s Day community service project in Swisshelm Park, I need to offer up another Radical-Middle-at-Omnivore shameless plug of a programming note.

I’m back in my role as guest editorialist for this afternoon’s installment of Mackenzie Carpenter’s great PG+ webcast, so all you folks with keys to the PG's premium kingdom can hop over the pay wall later today and check out my humble, if typically hot-blooded, take on one small part of the reaction to the Ft. Hood shootings.

If you’re not a PG Plusser — and, again, you should be; where else are you gonna get buy-one-get-one Vocelli’s Pizza deals side-by-side with the revelation that the Veterans Day Buddy Poppy was first manufactured right here in Pittsburgh? -- I can’t give you access to the video. At least not yet. (Stay tuned early next week for a chance to see it, and a whole lot more, for free.) But I will, like last time, at least share the text of the rant...

It was inevitable that after last week’s shootings, both the Ban All Handguns Absolutists and the Guns Don’t Kill People, People Who Just Happen to be Holding Guns Kill People Apologists, should come crawling out of their respective woodworks.

Both sides like to huff and puff and profess their own absolute moral certainty, but it seems to me the only true and slippery certainties when talking about guns and the people who kill with them are that both sides are wrong, that each side does make one good point, and that the only way truly and thoughtfully to address the issue is to tune out the absolutists, the apologists, and the extremists, and acknowledge a few simple truths:

Guns don’t kill people.

People kill people.

And people with guns kill people a hell of a lot faster and easier than people without them.

If you can’t admit — and accept — all three of these things, you have no right to any moral high ground. Or to have your opinion respected at all.

In the Radical Middle at Omnivore, I’m Chad Hermann.