Moderation

 Lately, people have been debating back and forth gun control and Obama care. The website for the new health insurance apparently is a nightmare but highly amusing as the President assured us that the experts were working diligently to repair it. Why wouldn't you have the experts make up website in the first place? Did we hire Budget Geeks or worse, let some low level government interns handle it? And yet another school shooting - so we have the liberals and the pacifists shrieking to abolish all guns and the NRA is quietly stockpiling everything in their underground bunkers, far from the prying eyes of Big Brother. I think our big problem is the usual - no middle ground. At all. Ever. As far as the Obama care - I'm not entirely opposed to it, but let's face it - the track record of the bureaucrats is a bit less than stellar, isn't it? Massachusetts I believe a few years ago came up with a plan that all the uninsured had to vamoose - scat if they didn't get insured. They were tired of footing the bill for the uninsured. They came up with a plan that people would have the option to  buy state catastrophe policies at a reduced rate - the upshot? The middle class had their own private, Medicaid and Medicare covered the poor and elderly - and the working poor, who barely scrape by got slammed. I would be easier with all of this if we could do a trial run of ALL the big issues. Can you imagine how much easier Obama care would have gone if they took say, 20,000 volunteers who agreed to be covered for a year before rolling out to millions? They could have worked out all the bugs, tweaked the insurance to reduce waste and maximize effectiveness and even done multiple trial runs of people signing up for it before parading around the final product that actually might have worked. They could have made sure the insurance was good coverage too without some one ending up with no medical coverage due to a loop hole or an error. Same with gun control - why not try out laws to see what a broad range of people can live with - and what works. We have plenty of laws on the books - but they only apply if you're a law abiding citizen. If you ban all guns you kill all sorts of industry - hunting, guiding, trap shooters, and yes, people that have guns to defend their home. I grew up in a home with guns, we all knew where the keys were kept, ammo was separate and no one ever got shot. In high school it wasn't unusual for the seniors to have shotguns as they went hunting right after school before it got dark, never thought a thing about it. But that was then, this is now, things have changed and honestly, we didn't have the fire power back then. If you attempted a school shooting you'd better be super fast on the reload because a 22 only holds two shells. So - yes we do need to look at our laws again, things have changed. But we need to stop having a knee jerk reaction, use our common sense. When they develop a new drug they don't just give it a name and stock the shelves, do they? Nope - they test it in the lab and when they're pretty certain it will work, a small controlled group that's monitored closely and they make changes as they go along until they the final product is safe and usable. Why can' we use that thinking for everything else in life we'd like to be safe and usable?