Guns and Illegal immigrants both are in the USA and there is no easy way to eliminate them. But dealing with the problems that sometimes are created is difficult.
On gun control, the question is the merits of a particular proposed law. If all it does is inconvenience law-abiding citizens, it may make people feel good, but accomplish little or even be counterproductive. There are also cases - someone had a felony conviction for writing a bad check, got his life together and still owned a gun and went to a pawn shop to sell it to get cash for his family. I think he got an automatic life in prison for doing so. Hard cases make bad law, but those are the only ones left. And politicians are the worst for grandstanding instead of trying to be statesmen. But this is why it is nearly impossible to have a discussion and make any progress.
CS Lewis’ “Bulverism” God in the Dock: "Bulverism" is worth a read and is on point. And it was written probably before any of us were born. I think discussion used to be higher on all levels. Now the first problem is to simply switch the conversation from the rhetorical to the dialectic. That the issues, truth, premises, logic, etc. are what matters. I find myself having to descend into the rhetorical and use some verbal judo to even get an opening. It happens so often that I find a truly rational discussion a rare pleasure. Yet I find it on both the right and the left. Vox Day has a blog, and Glenn Greenwald, now at the intercept, and a handful of others. They actually think through their positions. I respect a thoughtful disagreer, and detest team sycophants.
Here is the central excerpt from “Bulverism”, but do click the link
The only line they can really take is to say that some thoughts are tainted and others are not - which has the advantage (if Freudians and Marxians regard it as an advantage) of being what every sane man has always believed. But if that is so, we must then ask how you find out which are tainted and which are not. It is no earthly use saying that those are tainted which agree with the secret wishes of the thinker. Some of the things I should like to believe must in fact be true; it is impossible to arrange a universe which contradicts everyone’s wishes, in every respect, at every moment. Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant - but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method [Note: This essay was written in 1941.] is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became to be so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father - who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third - “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
I find the fruits of his discovery almost everywhere. Thus I see my religion dismissed on the grounds that “the comfortable parson had every reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in another world.” Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is an error, I can see clearly enough that some people would still have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the other way round, by saying that “the modern man has every reason for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is rejecting.” For Bulverism is a truly democratic game in the sense that all can play it all day long, and that it give no unfair advantage to the small and offensive minority who reason. But of course it gets us not one inch nearer to deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or false. That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds - a matter of philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided, the improper motives of some people, both for believing it and for disbelieving it, would remain just as they are.
On the talking pointless comment sections, you can explain a dozen times but they WILL not understand. It isn’t a matter of can’t - they have the ability - they just don’t want to. That you disagree with them is THE problem that allows them to dismiss you a priori.
On GG, the AAA industry has young white males as its target demographic. There are Korean beauty supply stores who have black women as their target demographic, and no one suggests they should add a barber-shop section. And it wasn’t marginalization. GG is split, but has a lot of rational people. Perhaps the SJW side does, but they aren’t as prominent and the “shouting down” is continuing. GG had a repo on github to coordinate and it was censored. Freebsdgirl’s censorship blocker for twitter will probably be there forever - and apparently the Raspberry Pi foundation is now using it to filter their tweets (anyone who follows anyone on the list is censored). Is this a way to have a discussion? And what was exposed is “We want you to make your games nicer for women, i.e. dumb them down, even though it won’t increase sales, or make the games better”. Then simply asking why gets “you are a racist sexist homophobe and I’m reporting you for threatening me!”. There is bad behavior on both sides, but I can’t find one from the SJW side who want to listen, which is what this post is about. Being good at debate, making good points is apparently “abusive”.