I agree that the left uses fear mongering to drive their points — it sells, it motivates. But, I’d argue that the right uses it even more and to greater effect. I claim I’m neigther left nor right, more just for balance.

You’ll get no argument from me on that point. I think a case could be made that Reds fearmonger more than Blues, and that Blues fearmonger more than Reds, and trying to actually prove either case would be very difficult, mathematically speaking. Specifically on the topic of guns, I will say this up front. The NRA are absolutely wretched at this. The one year I donated to them, I was instantly signed up to five or six different parallel fear mongering email lists, which were exceedingly difficult to expunge, and then they gave my money to Romney. So I cancelled my membership.

The Reds do this a lot.

Doctors already are “empowered to discuss gun ownerhsip” if you are seeking help from depression, I don’t know at what rate they do so. I think that people who seek your purchasing license should be honestly taught that they are increasing their chances of dying by suicide in a significant way … but they’d also have to be taught what depression is and how to recognize it … and they’d have to be taught to give up their guns because the depressed condition almost always goes away given enough time but it will not seem like it.

The bolded bit is incredibly important in my opinion. In my mind, that one factoid needs more exposure than anything else, and will lead to more lives saved than any other policy that’s ever been floated to the table.

But, being rational, I’d trade the whole “cake” back if the right would stop believing that we somehow cannot poop our cage and destroy ourselves ecologically via global warming and other large moves. We can. We are. I’d institute a truly massive R&D program to get us off of fossil fuel. It will require more than solar, new nuclear technologies, buying energy tech until they are economic (just like the Government bought its way into microchips, GPS and now SpaceX). Take your guns, give me, give you, that.

We could move the entire grid to fission in probably 20 years if we had the motivation. France runs their grid 80% off nuclear. Doing so makes complete and total sense to me, and I don’t think you’ll find opposition to that from the Reds.

My overall opinions on global warming are deep and nuanced and complicated. I don’t think carbon is the only problem. I think land cover changes are also a major contributing factor that’s been poorly studied, and need to be. I think if the IPCC modeling is correct, then the only way to avoid the “doomsday scenario” they’re talking about is World War Three, purely mathematically speaking. A 40% reduction in emissions is simply not possible otherwise. Since I’m not a fan of World War Three, I think our only other reasonable options are to build sea walls, nuclear plants, and try and get the climate science better nailed down in the interim.

But I don’t care to defend those thoughts on Medium, because I feel I should reserve this space for more defensible, better researched arguments, and I don’t care to put the time in to defend a global warming opinion. For now, I’ll let it rest as just an opinion.