Video: Talking State Budget And Gun Control On Valley News Live

Tonight I was on television for the first time ever. Chris Berg had me on the 6:30 Point of View segment on tonight’s Valley News Live broadcast (I phoned it in from Minot by way of Skype).

I was on opposite John Strand, editor of the High Plains Reader, and we talked gun control and the state’s budget in a segment that was entirely too short.

But hey, time flies when you’re having fun. Here’s the video (hint: I’m the chubby one with the beard).

I wish I’d gotten a chance to rebut Mr. Strand’s last comments about gun violence in America. He said he doesn’t believe it’s going down, but that’s not really something in which belief is optional. It’s fact. It may be devastating for the case anti-gun people make for gun control, but the simple fact is that even as gun ownership has proliferated in America gun crime has gone down according to the FBI’s national statistics and has been trending down for decades:

I won’t go so far as to say that more guns in society means less crime (though I certainly believe in advantages of a society that takes self defense seriously), but clearly the correlation between guns and more/deadlier crime doesn’t actually exist.

I also wasn’t fond of the way Strand talked about the oil boom, as if it were an invasion of these foreign cretins here to wreck our state. That is patently unfair. Yes, North Dakota is changing and not always for the good, but the people coming here are human beings looking to work and provide for themselves and their loved ones.

How about a little compassion?