I wish the NCAP luck in their efforts in gun violence and control legislation but hope they continue to reach out and find support in the other parts of their platform they mentioned above such as offender re-entry programs, youth job training and other non-gun control programs.

I would think it would have a greater chance to impact on violence by giving youth job opportunities and returning offenders an option to stay away from gang activity, to provide help with dealing with the ravages of drugs on families and communities and to thereby reduce the risk factors besides guns that someone like Mr. Abeler may have a easier time selling to his base of support.

That is a reasonable question that Representative Abeler should address. He says that he now understands the difference between his hunting guns locked in a gun safe and those weapons on the street that cause such havoc. He should act on that understanding.

I actually think that Mr Abeler, the person, has learned a valuable personal lesson. Unlike many of the voters in the district he represents, he seems capable of empathy and self examination. It would be courageous of him to act on his personal beliefs but if he gets too far out in front of the voters who elected him he puts his political career at risk. He has taken risks before however, perhaps he will again.

I have hunted since the age of 10 and I know the difference between guns that are used for hunting wild game and guns that are used for hunting humans. There is plenty of room for reasonable gun regulation, and as a lifelong hunter, I find it quite disturbing that hunting rights continue to be used as a political tool at the expense of human rights. We need to curb gun violence and get these handguns off the streets.

We also need to regulate the economic weapons that are being used to impoverish all but a few by allowing the siphoning off of local capital to offshore accounts. Much of the violence stems from a lack of economic opportunity for all people.

As a postscript, he did email me the evening this story ran, apologizing that he was too busy to respond to my queries. He hadn’t yet read the piece, and offered no further comment on the incident.

Representative Abeler also made this comment:

“If you are interested in the context, the comment arose out of a discussion about how hard it was to bridge the gap on some matters, in this case gun laws. I thought the group should know just how hard of a project that they had tackled. Virtually impossible, I told them. I compared it to the controversies of the abortion debate.”

The difficulty in addressing issues related to such hot button topics as guns and abortion is that they have been highly politicized. There is middle ground but it is like a demilitarized zone between two warring nations; scorched earth bounded by barbed wire. Representative Abeler is peering over the fence at friends and neighbors far away on the other side. He seems to be reaching out to break down these barriers and he deserves a great deal of credit for that. If there is a future for the Republican Party, it will be because of people like him.

When he was one of the six Republicans who voted to override the Governor’s veto of the the transportation funding bill last session, he showed himself to be willing to take a personal risk for a good cause. He paid dearly for that choice politically. But at that moment, he became a far better representative. The sentiment in the letter is borne of committing to actually being the kind of leader too many only claim to be.

Then again, he is a Republican representative, so what more can one expect?