You sit down with someone and say 'look, I want cars to have properly inflated tires, for the sake of safety, the economy, and the environment... what will it take to make it law to have gas stations have to have sensors that can detect a low tire and to refuse to dispense gas to a car with low pressure? We calculate the conversion will cost 2 billion' and then they tell you, and maybe the price is too high, they say 'we'll give you the 2 billion if it comes from green energy subisdies' and you say 'how about if 1 billion comes from there?' and they decline and offer 1.9 from there and .1 from new funds, and you say 1.2 and so on. Maybe you never strike a deal on that and instead come back and say 'hey, I've got it, we give a tax rebate to buy the sensors so long as the gas station agrees to offer a 5 cent per gallon discount to people with properly inflated tires, that 5 cents to come out of the gas tax share.' and now the others nod and agree to 1.2 because the voluntary incentive aspect is more palatable to them.

That's negotiation, we could use more of it. People constantly scream for it but the screamers either are apathetic moderates who don't know/care about the issues or they're raging partisans who think 'negotiate' means 'you give us most or all of what we want, and we give you nothing'

It think you seriously over estimate the impact of Public TV and the national endowment for the arts, especially the former in modern times. But it's just an example inspired by me viewing magazine capacity as mostly feel good whereas the right wanting to kill PBS/NPR is much the same, in terms of the amount it costs versus the attention it gets. Slashing a hundred million out of the NEA's budget has a higher 'dollar value' with the right then a hundred million out of welfare or green subsidies, it represents a better bargaining chip for the left. It's not a 'ploy', and you revert to demonizing the right in your head way to easily.

Saying a CCW doesn't make a person safer is, to me, identical to if you said saying a first aid kit and a cell phone don't make you safer.

As to a federal policy on CCW I believe that is legit, the existence of the 2nd amendment combined with modern travel make a solid case for it being in federal rather than state or municipal purview. My objection would be the 'mandatory repeat testing' part, I actually have no problem with requiring training for guns, I happen to think it should be done in schools like history or gym or sex ed, opt out style. I would want the phrasing on 'repeat' very carefully worded though to avoid abusive attempts to discourage CCW by making it inconvenient, expensive, or unnecessarily restrictive. You shouldn't need to do it yearly, it should cost much, and I'm way more interested in ensuring people know where the safety is and why you never touch a trigger until you squeeze it then whether they can hit the broadside of a barn. The big issue on that is that many anti-gun sorts will try to stick extra layers on it with the intent of discouraging acquisition, if I see legislation that makes that impossible or reasonably improbable I'd be okay with it.

It is a societal issue, yet you argue it in terms of individual tragedy. Rightly so too, since as societal issues go you are essentially arguing that even though most guns will never be used to commit a crime or inflict an accidental injury we should restrict access. You may as well say porn inclines some people to commit rape so we should ban it. All the worse, the left raises the specter of crime and accident, yet it principally focuses on legislation that has minimal practical effect on crime and hysterically resists common sense approaches to minimizing accident. To most of the left, if I proposed high schools had opt-out classes on gun safety and basic marksmanship, they'd throw a fit, even while insisting we should have mandatory classes on how to use a condom. Such an attitude is irrational to me. Now you personally have been shown to approach the issue more rationally but even you, IMO, display very contradictory tendencies when it comes to personal freedom and safety.

Boneheaded implies it was stupid, which is true, but misses the more important point that it was terribly unethical. As to the data you refer to, I'm not clear on how it would benefit us. I can almost always find a use for data but it has to be a pretty big and valuable use coupled to an inability to acquire a reasonable approximation through other means to get me to accept violating other people's privacy. Again, to me a gun is no different then a blender or hammer.

They kill each other with knives, we don't track those. The ability to use something for a violent purpose doesn't make it much different to me. A gun can be used to hunt, or protect, and Perrin's axe/hammer moral quandary always seemed very damn silly to me, since a hammer designed for combat isn't much good for forging whereas a war axe is actually just fine for cutting wood. Shooting someone with a gun is not a crime, injuring/killing someone deliberately without reasonable provocation is, be it by shooting them or bludgeoning them to death with a doorstopper fantasy novel. A gun is not a nuke, like a chainsaw it is decidedly dangerous but it does not represent an item of unacceptably high danger with minimal reasonable use like a privately owned nuke or box of hand grenades.

Having read the article, I find it lacks sufficient detail, it sounds like the reporter is presenting a narrative based on deliberately vague facts. There is one very big fact in there, Michael Allan is not his brother or father. He not only deserves to be judged on his own actions, ethics and law demand he be. I'll not say a certain extra wariness and observation is unwarranted, but we do not throw away the fundamental concept of presumption of innocence or accept guilt by association, and guns don't merit some exemption from that.

If you don't want to trade for it, then since we clearly do see it as taking away from our rights we will oppose it, and it will fail. Fair enough, you are not wrong to do so but you are wrong to use terms like compromise, when you are unwilling to offer any. My way or the highway isn't a great attitude for public policy but my way or my way is even worse. You categorically reject any bargain, rather than actually bargaining at all. I suggest defunding PBS and the NEA and you reject it out of hand rather than saying, say "Maybe a 10% cut". Well just to remind you, the left has no monopoly on morality, frankly I find the modern left fairly lacking in that quality, but negotiation doesn't require you to recognize the other side to have equal morality just to recognize that somethings are important enough to pay a price for, and with most things one can find a mutually agreeable price.

If these things are so important to you, and will save so may lives, surely there is some program the left would be willing to trade part or all of in exchange for it. This isn't a hostage situation, I very clearly do not believe such legislation will save lives, and since you can't convince me otherwise and I doubt are willing to claim I am irrational and unsound of mind, you can either try to get sufficient support from other sources or offer me and my ideological kin something we consider to offset what we will lose. This doesn't mean mutually agreeable things can't be found, but when none seem to appear after prolonged talk it changes compromise to exchange or conflict rather than discussion of principles and method.