It’s time to cool it with the over-the-top rhetoric in our politics. Talk of civil war or a national divorce, whatever that means, are unhelpful and just drive us further apart on issues that we should be able to come to agreement on.

Over the weekend, Rep. Matt Soper, R-Delta, posted to Twitter a heated comment in regards to some recent gun measures that have been introduced in the Colorado Legislature.

“Come and take it! They’ll have to invade the West Slope and murder us if they intend on us being defenceless! (sic),” he wrote in a Saturday tweet, a comment he also sent to The Daily Sentinel earlier that day. “We will NOT bow to tyrants and those who seek to disarms (sic) us need to be prepared for civil war!”

Soper apologized on Monday for some of the phrasing in the Tweet, which was the right thing to do. We understand how passionate people are about this issue. It’s also easy to get carried away on Twitter in a way you never would in a face to face conversion.

We doubt Soper would yell “prepare for civil war!” at another lawmaker. Posting online you may not be targeting someone specifically, but your colleagues and the people who support them can still see the words. It’s unhelpful. Soper, to his credit, acknowledged that he went too far.

“Over this weekend some of you may have noticed I acted out of character on Twitter,” he said from the floor of the House. “I feel that it’s my duty to explain why. Normally I’m known as being rational and reasonable, and choosing my words very carefully.

“They were chosen carefully, but I do want to apologize for a couple of words that were in the tweet because I do think it’s important that we choose our words carefully,” he added. “That doesn’t change my position, but I do want you to understand that firearms are something that are near and dear to folks on the Western Slope and throughout rural Colorado. I do want to say … I should have chosen a couple of different words that were included there.”

We want our representatives to be passionate about the issues. Over-the-top hyperbolic rhetoric isn’t the type of passion we need though.

What happens when people get that heated is that the two sides start to talk past each other. The ability to compromise and improve the situation, especially around gun violence, disappears.

This is frustrating because if you look at polling, we’re not as far apart on this issue as people think. Most Americans believe in the right to keep and bear arms, but there is also broad support for more gun control measures like comprehensive background checks.

We also think the Democrats sometimes overreach in their push for gun control. The focus on AR-15 style weapons is misguided, since those weapons are responsible for a tiny fraction of gun deaths. Things like trigger locks with fingerprint technology would likely be more effective in preventing deaths than banning AR-15s.

Either way, we can’t have a discussion around this important issue when the rhetoric includes threats of war. Remember learning about the last civil war? Brother killing brother? That’s what we’re talking about. How do you ever get consensus when that’s the level of the discourse?

We want everyone to be able to come to the table and work to reduce crime and violence in this state. We also want gun owners’ rights protected. None of that is possible without reasonable dialogue.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Editorial Board

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