Thank you.
Yes, I agree that people tend to go the path of least resistance and when it comes to restrictions on carrying and possessing guns that has meant just passing laws rather than trying to amend the Constitution to make such restrictions proper. And certainly it's true that people on the various sides of the various ideological divides are guilty of doing things that way. I want to come back to that general idea in a minute.
I would also say that I think most people in favor of gun restrictions sincerely believe that those restrictions are allowed by the Constitution. I think they are just wrong and that so often we convince ourselves of things because it's what we need to be the case. People think that we need gun restrictions so they convince themselves (or just assume, earlier people having already convinced themselves) that it's okay - i.e., in this context, constitutional - to pass gun restrictions. I don't think most people are consciously lying to themselves and others when it comes to thinking that gun restrictions are constitutional.
Back to the idea of people on various sides of the ideological and political divides doing the same things: The older I've gotten and the more people talking about ideological and political issues that I've been exposed to, the more I've realized that we're all the same when it comes to our failings in considering and thinking about such things. Almost all of the things that conservatives or Republicans accuse liberals or Democrats of doing - e.g., being brain-dead drones, being dishonest, being hypocritical, spinning things, cherry picking facts to suit their preferred narrative, being too partisan, being poorly informed, acting as though anything done by anyone on the other side represents everyone on the other side, just plain being stupid - those same conservatives or Republicans are guilty of themselves. The same is true in reverse. We deride the other side for their perceived failings while seemingly being oblivious to the reality that we have those same failings ourselves. The lack of self-awareness is amazing - again, coming from all sides.
When I was younger I thought that we - the conservatives or Republicans or whatever the we was in a given context - were the honest and well considered and fair minded and so on ones. Then after some time I came to realize that we too did much of the stuff that we accused the others of doing. We were better, but it was a matter of degree more so than of kind. Within the last few years I've come to realize that even that is being too kind to my side. We are not even meaningfully better when it comes to degree. We are just as bad - just as dishonest, just as intellectually inconsistent, just as spin-able, just as poorly reasoned and so on as the other side is. Our positions may on the whole, in my view, be the better ones. But our tactics and rhetoric and situational understanding and such are just as bad. We defend in our own side that which we criticize in the other to just as great a degree as they do. And both we and they (whomever the we and they happen to be) seem just as oblivious to that reality. Perhaps the most essential thing that's universally missing in our ideological and political postures is self awareness. We seem completely incapable of being honest with ourselves about ourselves. And it is in that singular condition that the ball game is lost; it is that reality alone that assures the continuation of most of the problems with our political systems.
