A different approach

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

My daughter’s boyfriend is a smart kid. I say “kid,” but he’s almost 19 and college bound, so I guess he’s actually an adult.

But again, I recognize his intelligence. He was in the top 10 in the Class of 2024 at the Academies of West Memphis, he’s got a full ride to the University of Arkansas and he’s got a good head on his shoulders.

But, fun fact: When it comes to politics, society and such we agree on virtually nothing. And that’s OK.

Over the past five years that he and my daughter have been dating, I have had many debates and discussions with him about all sorts of subject. He has a pretty ultra-conservative point of view, while I have, as you probably know if you are a regular reader of this column, have a pretty liberal stance on most things, so it’s always fun to take his point of view and try to

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get him to see the other side. I guess I’m trying to “indoctrinate” him, as they like to say.

Last night we got into the gun control issue. The fellow who barricaded himself in his mom’s house in Marion the other day prompted it. My daughter’s boyfriend and his family are avid huntets and all-around fans of guns, in the “my cold dead hands” realm of things when it comes to gun rights, so when I said, “That guy should not have access to guns,” I expected some blowback, but he actually agreed with me.

We ended up discussing the issue at length. My argument mostly consisted of gun ownership being mostly OK but some kind of training, registration and access control needed to be in place.

His main point was that the gun laws we have now largely arent working but we do need to keep them away from “crazy” people.

The phrase he landed on was “a different approach,” and I thought that was pretty apt.

Somewhere between everyone can have a gun and no one can have a gun there has to be a solution — albeit one we apparently have not yet tried.

Whatever that different approach might be, we are never going to find it until folks on both sides of the issue are willing to sit down and have a legitimate discussion about it, much like my daughter’s boyfriend and I did. If we can do it, our leaders can too!