War & Peace Quote by Ron Lewis

Ron Lewis is doing a very politician’s tightrope walk here: acknowledging the undeniable toll of gun accidents while carefully refusing to touch the third rail of gun regulation. The opening move, “We have all read tragic stories,” is a calibrated appeal to shared outrage that costs him nothing. It borrows the emotional force of grief without naming the obvious policy fights those stories usually ignite. By anchoring the problem in “misuse,” he nudges the reader toward individual error, not system design or market saturation. The tragedy is real; the frame is selective.

The phrase “local papers” matters, too. It shrinks a national epidemic into a series of isolated hometown mishaps, the kind that feel solvable with common sense rather than sweeping reform. “As lawmakers we can better promote safety and responsibility” signals action, but the action offered is tellingly soft: “encouraging” purchases. No mandates. No enforcement. No confrontation with manufacturers, lax storage laws, or political donors. It’s governance as suggestion.

“Gun safes” become a symbolic compromise, a consumer fix that shifts burden and cost onto the owner while preserving the cultural identity of gun ownership as basically legitimate and self-policing. Even “wrong hands” is a strategic blur: it invokes children, thieves, maybe criminals, without specifying which fear is being activated. The intent is to appear responsive to tragedy while staying inside the safe perimeter of pro-gun orthodoxy: reduce harm, keep the rights architecture untouched, and make responsibility a matter of private purchasing rather than public rulemaking.