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I’m going hunting tomorrow. Every year, my father, brother, a few family friends, and I haul an RV to eastern Washington and spend two days looking for quail. We put in a good ten to fifteen trail-less miles each day. Each morning starts at frosty, legal hunting light (6:30 a.m.), our thumbs barely warm enough to move the safeties. We stomp through sagebrush and push through brush, the dogs ranging in front and smelling for birds, sometimes successfully. We circle back to the truck at lunchtime, where we clean the birds and leave the tiny breasts in a cooler so the meat won’t spoil. It’s barely enough for one meal. We spend the second half of the day in sweaty t-shirts, and dust and sweat and bits of plants cover us in a smell of earth and gunpowder and quail. We don’t stop until the regulations say we have to (6:30 p.m.). The weekend exhausts everyone, the dogs most of all, who also love it most of all. When I tell people about this trip, about my family’s tradition for the past ten years, I share it with a blend of defiance, pride, and defensiveness.
The national conversation about gun control/rights has been reduced to a binary. For or against. Republican or Democrat. Bad arguments shout on both sides, and each year, wisdom seems to whisper a little quieter. Yes or no. Pick a side. When brought up, compromise, at best, means both sides losing. But compromise that leaves both parties bitter and plotting to undo the deal as soon as the next election rolls around is only a compromise in the same way the Korean War ended peacefully.