The Thing or Not The Thing....THAT is The Question

Along with many, I have been following the whole gun control issue. This post is not specifically about gun control but more about where I see the fallacy of this whole argument and how it relates to many issues of the day.

Where I see the disconnect is on an emotional level. No one wants violence to visit them or anyone else but what exactly is being accomplished when instead of looking at the behavior you look at the thing? I think government is becoming far too intrusive in our daily lives. I don’t believe the founders ever had the intent of letting government run our lives and in fact the design of our democratically elected government was specifically laid out to protect us from tyranny. But more and more you see the federal government trying to tell us what to eat and not eat; what to drive and not drive; what to drink and what not to drink. Unfortunately, the methods of controlling these behaviors are directed at the items, be they big gulps, guns or big macs.

You see, I think it is the whole wrong approach but is a seemingly expedient and thoughtful approach. It is an easy solution to say, ok, if I don’t want people to drink a 22 oz. soft drink than I will just do away with the 22 oz. soft drink. Is this fixing the problem? Does anyone who thinks about this on an intellectual level really think this fixes the problem? The problem is not the thing but the behavior. This can be translated to most everything in society these days. The real problem is related to something I’ve spoken about often and it is that what many seem to see as a fix being the easy, dismissive, feel-good way to solve the issue at hand and that is to eliminate the thing. That being said, we have not fixed the real problem. People have a way, these days, of substituting things with new things. So the behavior continues but just with a different thing.

I don’t know how we fix this. I don’t even know IF we can fix this. It seems to be an unending wagon train of things being taken from us while the crafty sort of beings we are find things to replace those things. I think as long as there are more people who think that the way we fix certain flaws in our character is by removing the things that cause the flaws then we will never see it change. Until people finally accept that changing problems in this society start with changing the behaviors this will continue on well past my life.