One of the ethical guidelines is to pay attention to what people do and not what they say. This guideline has been present forever. It has also become a guideline in Freakonomics which is a brand of lateral thinking or thinking out of the box. It has many applications so I used this theory created by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in ethics class. You have to love thinkers whose books contain stories to answer questions such as “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Mothers?”
One of their basic assumptions is that it is hard to convince people to change things such as the Republican and NRA fixed stance on gun control.
According to a commentary on Freakonomics (bongosoroio), never pretend that your argument is perfect which is the stance of both the Democratic Party and Republican Party. No one will buy into it. Acknowledge that your opponent’s argument has something to it. Ignoring it won’t get you anywhere. I found myself debating the Chair of the Religion Department at Swarthmore College from time to time (that’s what you do in Swarthmore as a pastime). We had mutual respect for one another. He and I would point out the strengths of each other’s argument as we were discussing a topic. (He provided more information for me than I did for him.}
Keep your insults and ad hominin (comments attacking the person) to yourself. Already we have seen too much of that from either side. What are the chances of Beto O’Rourke winning an argument against the current Texas leadership?
It is important to stick with the facts and not opinions. Data can include much about the passage of time of an issue and the degree of constancy and change.
Never forget that a person will not change their opinion because it is the right way to proceed. People have a propensity to never say, “I was wrong!” As close as they can get to this perspective is “mistakes were made but not by me.”
These guidelines will help us get moving forward in the gun debate since they are different in approach from everything that we have been dealing with since Columbine.
In addition, I was always taught as a counselor to ask the question, “What is the person getting out of this behavior even if it feels abhorrent to us? What is the motive? Find that fast.
Listen more than you talk. We tend to say what other people (our constituents and gun lobby) want to hear.
As soon as the other side senses that your motive is winning, you won’t.
As human beings we often say one thing and do another. Watch what people do and not what they say which brings me to the irony of the worst thing about the NRA Convention. Sure, the speeches were offensive but there is something that has been overlooked.
In an open carry arms state, no one was permitted to have a weapon in the arena when Trump was speaking. Shouldn’t that arena have been the safest place in America? Forget about the Secret Service requiring that. What a powerful statement it would be for the NRA to say we don’t need protection even when the former president was speaking. They could have put up a bullet proof barrier for him. He could have refused the protection.
Trump has made an excuse in every situation he has been in. He didn’t go to the capitol with his fellow insurrectionists because the “secret service didn’t think it was safe for me.” He has bone spurs courage.
Hold the previous guidelines up to see through as we witness the debate to be for or against gun control.
By the way, in my opinion, adolescence know all of what is above by instinct. I always have said that they would make the best therapists in the world for they can spot a phony person or phony argument from a mile away.
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