David Hogg has an un-dumb take on guns for a change

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

David Hogg has kind of become a favorite punching bag among pro-gun voices. After all, let’s take a nice, long look at his history of saying really stupid things. He’s kind of brought all of that on himself.

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But there is a saying about blind squirrels and acorns.

In practicality, most gun control advocates are too busy avoiding what you and I would call “acorns” for these purposes for the phrase to apply, but David managed to stump upon on.

Hat tip to our sister site Townhall.

Now, I have an issue with research, because we’ve seen some of the problems with this research. If we could get serious, unbiased research that looked for answers and not excuses for more gun control, I’d be down.

But the rest of this tweet is…shockingly reasonable.

He’s right, there’s no way to round up 400 million firearms even if the government went door-to-door. They might get a lot of them, but not all of them, so yeah, trying to even consider something like that is a waste of time.

Further, I’m totally on board with discussing mental health efforts to reduce the number of suicides. I’m not going to differentiate between “gun suicides” and other suicides because I think that’s ridiculous. Killing yourself is killing yourself. No one feels better that you didn’t shoot yourself.

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Seriously, this is reasonable.

A later tweet may be more interesting, though.

Honestly, I can respect this, too.

Granted, Hogg may just be thinking he can convince others to support some level of gun control or there may be something else at work, but he’s reaching out to find common ground, and based on the other tweet, he’s talking outside of gun control.

I’m genuinely surprised to see this because Hogg’s brand has been very much about being an anti-gun firebrand. This is a reasonable approach that might actually accomplish something. Especially if he really has any influence with the gun control side of things.

Imagine if we didn’t have to fight over non-gun control interventions. Think about a place where we could address mental health problems without there being some battle over how we’re deflecting from the problem.

We’re not giving up ground on guns. Maybe Hogg sees that and is instead willing to turn his attention toward more productive efforts.

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Or maybe this is just a sham to look like the reasonable guy for some purpose or another.

I honestly don’t know, but it’s nice to see a prominent gun control advocate stepping up to reach across the proverbial aisle to talk with us about non-gun control solutions rather than to “reach across” in an effort to browbeat someone into giving up our Second Amendment rights.

Will this version of Hogg stick? I honestly don’t know.

I have reached out to him. I don’t know if he’ll respond–he didn’t promise he’d get to everyone, after all–but if he does, I’ll probably share that conversation. Who knows, maybe I can talk him into having a conversation on Cam & Co.

That would be interesting to watch, to say the least.

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