It isn't an interesting dilemma. There aren't any complicated politics. It's not one of those things where we all have to sit down and work out a grand compromise that respects the validity of "both sides" regardless of whatever David Brooks says. Also, why are people still worried about David Brooks? The big op-ed pages aren't just bad, they're utterly irrelevant. Don't read that stuff. Don't discuss it. Don't give it any power. That's exactly how we end up behaving as though something completely straightforward like gun control is "controversial" and therefore inactionable even though that clearly isn't the case.
This isn't a debate at all. It's just a straightforward assertion of power by a well-focused and funded single-issue lobby. Also it is boring and predictable. That it remains boring and predictable in the face of the horrors it enables is an obscenity. Nobody's going to stop that by going on CNN to have meaningful dialog with soulless death merchants. Sure, it's cathartic to watch Dana Loesch and Marco Rubio get owned by a bunch of teenagers. But, really, that's what they want. It isn't going to shame them into yielding. They get to keep the money they were paid to endure it. Putting them on the stage and beating the hell out of them just reinforces the conceit that they need to be reckoned with. They don't. They need to be ignored. This is a dumb argument. And people keep dying because we allow it to go on.
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