In the wake of horrific mass shootings, we don’t seem to get a choice about discussing guns, gun control, gun rights, the Second Amendment, or anything to do with firearms. That choice is more or less taken away from us.

Oh, we still have the choice in theory, but since it means either defending our right to keep and bear arms or losing it, there really isn’t a choice.

And there are a lot of places where I fully expect to see anti-gun sentiment expressed, and that includes university publications like USC’s Daily Trojan.

What I didn’t expect was to see someone actually make a valid point on the gun debate.

The author, Helen Nguyen, isn’t exactly pro-Second Amendment and that comes across pretty clearly in her piece. Yet it’s how she wraps it up that caught my attention.

There are those who believe that gun control is not the solution to gun violence in the U.S., but I find it hard to believe that these same people want kids to die. I still have that much faith in humanity.

Either side of the gun control argument is met with opposition from the other side. But it’s time we all understand that it doesn’t matter if you love or hate guns, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, and children dying at the hands of gun violence isn’t either. Until we stop, innocent lives will be disregarded in favor of arguments.

She’s not wrong.

I’m sorry, but I’m not giving up my right to keep and bear arms. I’m not giving up my guns just so some people can feel better about themselves in the wake of a horrific mass shooting. If that’s the totality of the solutions being proposed, nothing is going to happen.

I honestly and sincerely believe–no, I know for a fact that if we passed gun control, we wouldn’t see the results proponents claim. Instead, more innocent lives would be lost because some had no ability to defend themselves adequately.

What Nguyen seemingly says here is that we need to start looking at places we can find common ground. It can be done, too. Look at what just happened in Virginia. They passed a tax credit for gun safes, a measure that may well increase gun safety. It wasn’t gun control, so folks on our side could support it, but it was something that promoted gun safety, so the other side did as well.

You can’t tell me that there’s literally nothing we can find common ground on if people were to just open their minds a bit.

In the wake of Parkland, the right advanced the idea of hardening our schools. They were ridiculed by anti-gun activists, but they were also on to something. We know that the Nashville shooter looked at another school and dismissed that one as a target because security was too tight.

Yet that was an example of non-gun control thinking that might have accomplished something.

Guns are not the problem. They’ve never been the problem.

If we look beyond guns and start looking for other ways to address these horrific acts, we might get somewhere.

I’m not budging on my gun rights. Continuing to push that line is going to mean trying to move the immovable object. It’s not happening.

So why not look for things that folks like me might be willing to talk about and consider?