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want to drive a car that s one kind of licence if you also want to ride a motorbike that s another licence with a separate test if you want to drive a large commercial vehicle like a truck the commercial driver s licence cdl is a separate and additional test and documentation with numerous additional facets and requirements allowing you to do things like transport hazardous cargo or particularly heavy goods or outsize loads analogising to the firearms situation if you want to be legally able to carry a gun you should have to do a firearms education course and pass a gun safety test that confirms a minimum basic competency in firing it as well as knowledge of basic gun safety protocols if you want a small calibre handgun that s one kind of licence if you want a hunting longarm that s another kind if you want a high calbre pistol like a magnum or something that s another licence there would be a minimum age requirement to do the firearms education course we don t let 7 year olds learn to drive do we the states or perhaps even individual communities should probably set this lower age requirement for themselves maybe we should be looking at a firearms licence similar to a drivers licence just an idea on top of the licencing of drivers motor vehicles themselves are individually registered with the state taxed and inspected annually to make sure they meet basic safety standards while the emissions test has no parallel in firearms the idea that as a matter of course all guns will be registered with the state and taxed would probably send most gun owners into a flat spin nothing causes foaming at the mouth of your average second amendment activist than the words gun registry then they ll know exactly where to come when they come for our guns is the common refrain and yet why we register our cars and only the most deranged of paranoids would suggest that the government is coming to take those away by force the right of freedom of movement is part of the first amendment and no one suggests that the regulations we have around car ownership registration and licencing are an infringement the idea that the government is going to take away guns by force is easily the most intractable of american political myths and yet recent unwillingness to pass even the most basic commonsense gun safety laws and contrarian willingness to further loosen existing gun laws on the part of most of the current crop of politicians suggests that the reverse if anything is truer politicians seem unwilling to do even basic things like banning the bump stock devices that simulate fully automatic fire in a semiautomatic weapon and yet you believe these same politicians are just waiting to pounce and forcibly take your guns i do not see that the law abiding gun owners that the nra and other firearms groups tout as the salvation of america have anything to fear from a gun registry motor vehicles require fuel which is taxed in other countries like my native uk it s taxed quite a lot should we tax ammunition and have the resulting funds channeled into mental health and or a fund to help the victims of mass shootings that might be appropriate i m not necessarily saying this is what we ought to do about gun safety but on the other hand there are some interesting ideas here in addition to repairing and extending the background check system that the nra have paid their pet politicians to break and bend the proper functioning of so that they can say see background checks don t work some of this might at least serve as a point of discussion if you want to point out how cars are also deadly weapons it s instructive to consider how comparatively regulated our driving is compared to what seems to be the case for firearms at the very least it s something to think about posted in miscellanea transatlantica tagged gun control gun safety second amendment leave a comment january 25 2018 by geoffhorswood the reluctant evangelist my pastor is doing some teaching on spiritual gifts at the moment in our church s after service bible study time and naturally we re doing one of those spiritual gift inventory quizzes as part of it i ve done a boatload of different ones of these over the course of my christian life i used to love them and set quite a bit of stock in the results these days i ve done so many that i confess to being a bit more sceptical part of my mind is always looking at the test itself cataloguing possible blind spots and trying to determine the precise theological perspective of the testers when it comes to the supernatural it s always interesting to see how a low supernatural perspective quizmaker handles stuff like prophecy or the message of knowledge anyway for the first time ever on one of these i managed to score higher for the gift of evangelism than i did for the gift of teaching i imagine my university friends are now giggling geoff might have the gift of evangelism i was well known in my circle in those days for hating the idea of doing evangelism and being dragged kicking and screaming virtually at gunpoint through the agapé campus crusade in the uk where no one uses the awful word crusade any more run evangelism training foisted upon us by the executive committee of our uni s christian union one of my best friends was said body s evangelism secretary and i recall long mutually frustrating talks in which he endeavoured to badger me into being more active in doing evangelism and i threw up roadblocks of every conceivable kind the thing is i ve had evangelism spoken over me by almost every prophetic person i ve encountered right back into my teens and while the various prophetic words have always rung true otherwise it s something i never understood as far as i could tell i was a teacher much more than i was an evangelist it didn t help that all the evangelists i d ever encountered were loud horribly extroverted expert conversationalists that naturally gravitated towards people and were good at engaging total strangers and if they were teen evangelists add in that they all had a fetish about telling stories involving baby poo honestly do they train all teen evangelists in some central facility that gives them a test on the quality of their baby poo stories it s uncanny evangelism wasn t me as far as i could tell i was and am very introverted terrible at basic conversation of the type that gets called small talk and somewhat fearful of talking to people i don t know in addition i still have no idea how such evangelist types segue between regular conversation and jesus i think i doubly frustrated my friend because i have the sort of mind that gravitates to apologetics i can make a reasonable case for what i believe with most people if they have honest questions rather than just looking for excuses not to believe i keep that sort of stuff in my head it s interesting to me and yet it used to be that i would do virtually anything rather than participate in evangelism cleaning toilets looked good i believed what god appeared to be saying through those various prophetic words but i didn t want it and i didn t see how it fit god would have to sort it out because i wasn t going to several decades later and i find myself both beginning to embrace the idea of evangelism and letting go of the illusion that i m a teacher i no longer believe that to be the case i don t explain well people frequently need an explanation after one of my explanations not the mark of a gifted teacher for all my clinging to that in order to fend off those wretched evangelists part of my problem was and is that the way they generally try and train you to do evangelism is so 1950s or 1970s at best tracts the four spiritual laws or knowing god personally by its marginally better british title street witnessing door to door like a jehovah s witness or other heretic sectarian none of this is remotely natural for me i was always at a loss as to how you were supposed to get from introducing yourself to a random stranger to opening up a booklet entitled knowing god personally and going through it as if it s some kind of all purpose instruction manual how many times does a random stranger come up and naturally get into going through a little pamphlet with you in real life all evangelism training i ve ever had inflicted upon me makes the basic assumption that you already know how to have a basic conversation usually with a stranger to this day i don t believe that s personally all that true i never know what to discuss with people i m not a sports fan any sport i don t do the whole country scene that texans are so into my politics are nearly diametrically opposed to the majority surrounding me i don t have time to watch much tv i can barely hold up my end of a conversation with someone i know relatively well and as for taking charge of a conversation and steering it toward spiritual things what do you think i am some sort of loudmouth extrovert at best i can manage some sort of heavy handed and contrived segue that feels completely unnatural to me and probably is worse for the designated victim the easy bit for me is talking about jesus i m relatively comfortable discussing spiritual things or debating the evidence that the bible is reliable it s actually getting to that point that i find next to impossible i hate feeling like i m making some sort of cold call sales pitch all of my cultural background screams that i m committing the cardinal english sin of imposing on someone sales is so fake anyway i don t trust those slippery buggers in marketing i always get the impression they ll say anything at all to sell their product truth is irrelevant just make the sale and don t get caught out in a demonstrable lie not interested in becoming a salesman even for jesus my solution is as simple as it is counterintuitive if my experience of evangelism training is anything to go by place yourself in situations in which people are already primed to talk of things spiritual my discovery of another way dates to several years ago now on a youth with a mission discipleship training school in montana having taken a week long mini outreach to the thriving metropolis of spokane washington it s a school in nw montana you need a separate scale for what constitutes a thriving metropolis we were instructed one afternoon to wander around the city looking for opportunities to tell people about what jesus has done for us ugh talking to strangers with the added burden that i need to find some way to inflict a phony sales pitch on them double ugh and so i found myself wandering the streets of spokane with a worry in my mind and a sinking feeling in my heart i didn t feel i could legitimately duck the assignment telling lies on a discipleship training school about how hard i had tried to find someone to talk to seemed counterproductive besides god talks to them and i was sure that he d rat me out i wandered past a christian science reading room i had some experience of debate with jehovah s witnesses and a bit less with mormons they aren t as common in the uk as they are in america but beyond being told in my growing up that they were an heretical sect neither christian nor science was the description i remember i knew nothing about christian science i don t know anything about debating with them i thought and carried on walking but then i stopped but at least anyone in there will presumably be ready to talk about spiritual things i thought at least i won t have to do the unnatural and nasty minded thing of trying to strike up a bait and switch conversation with a stranger so i turned around and went in the great thing about walking into a den of heresy or scriptural misinterpretation is that they will do all the work of getting the conversation onto spiritual things for you who needs to be able to run a conversation in order to do evangelism who needs to master the arcane art of unnatural segue or bait and switch conversational jiu jitsu place yourself somewhere where they want to tell you about what they believe and let them do the conversational heavy lifting then ask them questions about what they say i can do this easily not knowing anything about what they believe in some ways makes it easier because i honestly really want to understand so that i can identify where they differ from the consensus of mainstream historic christian teaching and they pick up on that genuine want to know and open up it s so easy it s nothing like how they train you to do evangelism it s the total opposite of any evangelism book i ve had thrust upon me to this day i recall the dreadful out of the saltshaker with a certain amount of loathing with its hyped this will change your life americanism and its phony sounding confession that the author had once found evangelism difficult i bet you did not have my level of incapacity with basic conversation rebecca manley pippert knowing god personally booklets and all the contrived sales talk of the street evangelist or door to door worker do not work for me so called friendship evangelism too often felt dishonest like i was pretending to be someone s friend in order to target them and when those recommending we all do friendship evangelism loudly proclaimed that we all know how to make friends i always felt like putting my hand up and saying i don t other people made friends with me but i honestly didn t feel like i knew how to initiate friendship if making friends is easy for you i can understand the attraction of friendship evangelism to me it was always being instructed to do something incredibly difficult making friends in order to do something equally difficult talking about jesus if you groove to street ministry god bless you for myself being accosted on the street when i m trying to do my shopping or find some lunch by someone with an agenda makes me hostile and defensive and you re immediately fighting an uphill battle and the same goes nearly double for door to door i operate under the assumption that any strangers ringing my doorbell are unwanted salespeople or unwanted cultists on the doorstep after you ve interrupted what i was doing is not where i want to do my buying and selling or have a conversation about the true way i d much rather go onto their turf and wait for them to engage me in conversation where they re open to talking about spiritual things and i m not feeling a double dose of guilt both for inflicting someone else s brand of in person telesales on them and because i ought to find nothing more fulfilling as a believer than telling someone about jesus but actually this sucks i m not foolish enough to believe that this is the sole way we all ought to do evangelism it s a way that maximises my personal strengths and works around my weirdnesses and weaknesses likely it wouldn t work as well for too many other people most people don t have my hangups and feeling of inadequacy to the apparently simple task of befriending people but because all of the ways i have been shown feel eit...