Arguing, purposefully but respectfully

Two pieces in the aftermath of the Las Vegas aftermath that I want to highlight, because they're so gentle and humane without being wishy-washy.

The first is from David French at National Review. His conservatism - his social conservatism, especially - is not mine. But I very much appreciate how he decided to respond to Jimmy Kimmel's response to Las Vegas: Not with demonizing or mockery, like so many conservatives did, but with a dose of understanding. The title of the post is "Jimmy Kimmel is sincerely wrong about guns," and that may tell you as much as anything about the tone.

French:

Humanity has struggled to neutralize evil men for millennia. For millennia, we have failed. It doesn’t mean that we don’t continue to try. It doesn’t mean that we close ourselves off to innovative solutions and new ideas. It does mean, however, that even the best of intentions and the most genuine of monologues have to be exposed to the cold light of law, reason, and facts. Sincerity only makes misinformation more dangerous. Kimmel is misleading Americans, and when he misleads, he’s not acting as a “moral authority,” he’s clouding the debate. 

I don't agree with all of French's conclusions in the post, but he treats Kimmel like a person who was sincerely sad about the massacre, sincerely looking for solutions, but lays out his disagreement.

Similarly, some thoughts from Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic.

But I try to avoid expressing anger at any honest reaction in such moments, keeping in mind that we all bear tragedy differently; and that among the dead in Las Vegas and the heroes who shielded the living were people who would have reacted in all those ways had the atrocity happened someplace else. I try to be forgiving even of ghastly jokes or callous comments, because many are much better than what they say when suddenly subject to horrors that can scarcely be conceived; insofar as they behave badly, it is rooted in the trauma of helplessly watching the terrible specter of worldly evil. 

We’re stuck together in this era of connectedness; we’ll react to many future tragedies together: mass shootings, natural disasters, mass casualty accidents, terrorist attacks, even wars. Human difference ensures that many will have different notions of how one ought to react, and that some will behave badly by most of those standards. To be forgiving of others while trying to be constructive is our charge.

We will always have disagreements. Some of them may well nigh be impossible to resolve. And tone-policing can be a way of blocking justice, admittedly. But maybe one solution to all our woes is to treat our neighbors in a neighborly fashion - to treat them, no matter how much we disagree, as people with sets of hopes and fears and ways of seeing the world that feel legitimate to them. This is harder to do in some cases than others, and God knows I fall short. But anger gave us Trumpism, which begat anger. French and Friedersdorf offer an example of breaking the cycle.