TIL my 'both sides are equally bad' take in a gun debate got me a DM that actually made me think
I used to post stuff like 'both parties just want control' every time a gun thread came up here, and honestly I thought that made me the reasonable one. Then a guy named Dave, who said he owns a shop outside Reno, sent me a DM after one of those comments. He said something like, 'You never once asked why I lock up my guns, you just told me I was paranoid.' That line stuck with me for days. I went back and looked at my comments from the past year and counted 14 times I did the exact same thing: jump in, say both sides are dumb, and leave without asking a single question. So I tried something different in a thread about red flag laws. I just asked people what would need to be in a law for them to trust it, and the answers surprised me. Nobody wanted confiscation, and nobody wanted zero rules either. I still have my own views, but I stopped leading with the shrug. Has anyone else had a stranger call out their whole way of arguing, and did it actually change anything for you?