Parenting & Family Quote by Herb Kohl

Kohl’s line is doing the oldest trick in the legislative playbook: reframe a contested power struggle as a simple matter of adult responsibility. “After a week of back and forth” sounds weary and procedural, as if the debate is mostly noise, not a genuine clash over rights, enforcement, and culture. That setup flatters the listener: you, too, are tired of the ideological ping-pong. Now let’s be reasonable.

The key phrase is “consensus developing,” a subtle act of political stagecraft. It suggests momentum and inevitability: the adults in the room are converging, and anyone still objecting is choosing to stand outside the circle of maturity. Pair that with “common-sense amendment,” and Kohl doesn’t just endorse a policy; he claims ownership of rationality itself. Opponents aren’t merely wrong, they’re unreasonable.

Then comes the clincher: “keep handguns away from children.” It’s an emotionally loaded narrowing of the issue, designed to make disagreement feel morally suspect. Few lawmakers want to be recorded as voting against “children,” even if their actual concern is definitional (What counts as “away”? What counts as “child”?), constitutional, or practical (enforcement, storage, parental liability). Kohl’s intent is to collapse those complexities into a single, unanswerable question: do you want kids with guns?

Context matters: gun debates often stall in absolutist language. Kohl’s sentence is crafted to create a safe landing zone for waverers, offering them a vote they can describe back home as neither anti-gun nor soft on safety, just “common sense.”