And, honestly, this creates something of an impasse because we're not giving up our guns, especially when we know gun control doesn't actually stop criminals.

But there is one area that such common ground exists. Both sides agree that people should lock up their guns. It's just about everything else that's a point of disagreement.

As two children played and hopped along a sofa, a loud bang punctuated the relative silence of a Columbus West Side living room before the shouting began.

"Is that gun powder?" yelled one of three adults after they rushed into the room.

"Where is it?" someone said before a man reached into the couch cushions and another bang followed.

Security camera footage captured the entire January 2023 incident, which resulted in burns and temporary hearing loss for the the child who found the gun and unintentionally fired it. But his mom, Lashawndra Allen, realizes just how much worse things could have gone.

"Not every parent is lucky enough to say their child didn't get hurt in a situation like mine," Allen told The Dispatch. "If you can avoid another child getting hurt, you want to make sure you speak up about this."

Unintentional shootings like this have played out 205 times across Ohio since 2015, according to data from Everytown For Gun Safety. Despite being the seventh largest state by population, Ohio is third in the nation, behind only Texas and Florida, for the number of unintentional shootings by kids.

Columbus, which is Ohio's largest city, has seen 42 unintentional shootings since 2015, which is more than any other city in the state, data shows.

A possible solution is one of the few things Second Amendment supporters and gun control advocates actually agree on —the need to safely store a firearm, especially in homes where young children live.

But whether it's a law that puts guns under lock and key, a tax break or education and encouragement is a debate that's still raging.

The truth is that tax breaks for gun storage devices are a rare place of bipartisan agreement on the issue of gun storage. People who buy storage devices are more likely to properly store their firearms.

This is a good thing as it doesn't create a mandate that takes no account of an individual's situation before telling people what they have to do.

And let's be real, there are some mandates that are more problematic than others. None are good, mind you, but take a look at the mandate that was up for consideration in Minnesota. You had to keep the gun locked up at all times when it wasn't specifically being used. Keeping it under you control inside of your home wasn't enough. It had to be locked up, which meant useless for self-defense.

But here's the part pro-mandate folks don't want you to know, if they're even honest enough to acknowledge it, is that this is where all mandates will, in time, go.

What happened in Minnesota was that it was too much, too soon.

Instead, what will happen is more benign mandates will pass such as those we've seen in other states, and as soon as something happens that gives them a pretext, they'll expand the mandate. Step by step, the mandatory storage laws will come to mirror those proposed in Minnesota.

We completely agree about the importance of gun storage and no one is really opposing tax breaks on gun storage devices. That is common ground and we should make use of it. Both sides will benefit.

The problem is that the anti-gun side won't be happy with that no matter how well it works.