Everyone will tell you never to discuss politics, religion or race in business. However I have never believed in or practiced this “rule”. My best clients and suppliers (and I’m fortunate to have many) are also among my best friends. After many years running a factory our business has evolved to be dominated by the brokering of preowned medical imaging equipment. I like to describe my job as getting on the phone to talk to my friends…I give them money and they give me money and we solve problems together for ourselves and our clients. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.
Everyone will tell you never to discuss politics, religion or nationality/cultures in business. However I have never believed in or practiced this “rule”. My best clients and suppliers (and I’m fortunate to have many) are also among my best friends. After many years running a factory, our business has evolved to be predominantly the brokering of pre-owned medical imaging equipment. I like to describe my job as getting on the phone to talk to my friends…I give them money and they give me money and we solve problems together for ourselves and our clients. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.
And many of you know that I have an insatiable interest in learning. About our industry. About products. About processes. And most of all, about you. I want to know what it’s like to live where you live, what makes you a religious person or not, what your politics are and why you support candidates I might not, how you feel about major issues, about your family and about your hopes and dreams. And I’m not shy about telling you about myself, my beliefs and my “truths”.
Let’s get to a key point: I’m a proud, card-carrying Californian. I was born here and have lived most (not all) of my life is this wonderful place. And 
although I consider myself an independent thinker, I lean heavily to progressive agendas in terms of politics and social policy. It’s the sunshine.
Many of my business friends are more conservative, but because we break that “don’t talk about…” rule, we can and do talk. And I believe that means we do more business together and we trust each other more.
The world I work in is not a world of polarized people, name calling, and finger pointing. We talk about the facts that are important to each of us, rather than calling each other’s information “fake news”. We bring our sources to our discussions and don’t rely on CNN or Fox News to be our encyclopedias.
So what’s the point of all of this?
It’s me taking a risk to tell you how I feel about guns in my community. It’s me asking you to read further to hear me out. It’s me promising to post alternative, respectful comments that I may not agree with.
What finally pushed me to write this blog after a lifetime of bearing witness to mass murders was an article published by Aunt Minnie. I’ve provided a link to it below. It’s a short note published in The Atlantic Magazine by Florida radiologist who is now against assault rifles (which I believe are correctly called “weapons of war”). It’s about what she sees on the x-rays of the victims of such weapons. It an article that clearly shows that one can’t change words to sugarcoat what these weapons are: intentionally designed human killing machines.
Now, if you will let me, let’s leave that issue for a minute and talk about what we know works for us in our successful businesses. That’s quality control. I learned rules of modern quality control as a college student. On the one hand, you can do statistical sampling to figure out how many widgets might be of poor quality and then set up tests to try and find them at the end of the production line, or you can look at each step in the production and line and figure out where the defeats happen. The story I love is about Dr. Deming, the guy who invented modern QA and took it to Japan and Toyota when American companies laughed at him. The story goes that he was hired by the firm that made Chicklets gum to develop a sampling system to try to cut down on the large percentage of deformed gum pieces they were producing. Instead of setting up a “band-aid” at the end of the line, he spent his allocated consulting time painstakingly reviewing each step in the production process. In end he found the defective form making the misshapen gum, changed the form and developed a simple inspection process.
So many “experts” on the so-called “gun-control” issue talk about better application checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those with mental health issues. The truth is that this process does not prevent people from becoming criminals or developing mental health issues after they purchase guns. How are you going to check for that? How are you going to guarantee that those guns are then taken away? How is that going to prevent more mass shootings?
Sorry, more checks are not going to work because they can’t foretell the future and, as we already know, there are too many ways to get around these
checks or for the checks not to be implemented or communicated properly.
These checks are just more band-aids and we all know what happens when you put one band-aid on top of another older one. Eventually the one at the bottom loses its stickiness and they all fall off…which in this case means another mass murder.
The deformed mould that causes many of these mass murders is the assault weapon, a weapon of war.
Just as Dr. Deming did, let’s use our common sense and change the model.
It may take a long time to clear our communities of these weapons of war, but it took a long time to acquire so many. We just have to start somewhere at some time. That where is here and that time is now.
Read the following article…and thanks for listening even if you disagree with me.
What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns
The simple fact is someone shot the arrow
Someone thrust the sword
Someone lit the fuse
Someone pulled the trigger
Someone needs to be brave and stop the murders
Maybe someone needs to do their job
That’s why I think we have a government we allow to know everything about our lives
Let’s band buses they kill too
If we recall one thing from the beginning
Humans kill other humans
How sad we will never be totally successful in stopping this evil act
We must always be vigilant
[Editor’s note – This came into my email from my friend so although it says it from me, it’s not…it’s from Craig.]
I’m not much of a debater but I do enjoy a good conversation.
I’m a conservative with a very open mind. Like you I see no need for assault style weapons in the public’s hand. I am also not one of these people that believe that we need to preserve the right to bear arms in order to rise up against some rogue government that might come to power. There is no way all the guns in America could ever match the fire power of the US government. That battle would be over in one minute and we would just have to live with consequences. I used to hunt and always ate what ever I shot but I no longer pursue hunting. I would rather golf or lie on a beach somewhere. I do find security in having guns locked up in my house in the very unfortunate event that I would need to defend my family from an intruder. I don’t ever expect to use them but I also don’t expect to use the fire extinguishers in my house but I would never get rid of them.
I also have a strong believe that we all have our own ideas and all the debate in the world will not change each other. However, I do think we need to make an honest effort to talk and listen to one another and try to find a common ground and then strive to improve upon the situation that we are now in. I have my religion and believes and I am so happy that you have yours and strongly support them. I am not the kind of person that thinks that my believes are the only true believes and all others be damned. If that were true I would be the true divine being and I am far from that.
Despite our differences, I think you and I are closer than you think on many things.
Thanks for sharing and listening.
God bless America.
Craig
[Editor’s note – This came into my email from my friend so although it says it from me, it’s not…it’s from Kevin.]
I took time to read your blog this morning and though I have a different take on this subject I respect your opinion. That is the great thing about America, we don’t all have to agree and we can freely state our opinions without fear of being flogged in the public square for stating them. Since I took time to read your take on this subject I’d appreciate if you’d take time to hear my side of the story.
Guns have been part of the fabric of America forever. Growing up I remember kids bringing guns to school for demonstration speeches in in speech class. They would demonstrate how to disassemble and clean a gun. Now of course they had great respect for the power of the gun. They brought them in unloaded and left them in the office during their other classes. These kids had no intention of ever shooting up a school and we never even heard of a mass shooting at the time. Can you imagine today if a kid requested permission to make this same demonstration speech. What changed?
Guns aren’t the problem, the change is in our society is the problem. Saying a gun causes mass shooting is like saying cars cause mass pile ups on the freeway. When you and I were kids our society had a common set of values and a very defined line of what was right and what was wrong. We had families with parents that helped us learn these values, morals, ethics and how to treat your fellow man. The American family is the institution that held our society together.
For decades now the pop culture of our country and our government has torn away at the fabric of the American family. They have ridiculed family values and role of a father and mother in a loving family. They have blurred the lines of right and wrong by telling us there are no moral absolutes and challenged us for questioning any lifestyle counter to ours. Society has bought into this lie lock stock and barrel. We now change spouses like we’re trading cars. We’ve decided it’s too much work to educate our children on our values so we turned that over to the school system. We’ve made these broken homes dependent on the government for a paycheck so now the government is the father in far too many homes while the real father is out starting another broken family rather than caring for the one he already has. You know as well as I do that once we turn anything over to the government they will screw it up Big Time!
So the problem isn’t the gun it’s a kid that has not been taught right from wrong or how to respect the life of his fellow man. If you ban the guns the only ones having them will be the criminals and that doesn’t sound like a recipe for success to me. There will always be a gun industry whether it is legal or not. Robbing banks has always been against the law but the last time I checked banks are still getting robbed. So how will changing the legal status of guns end gun violence? The law abiding citizens will turn theirs in and the criminals will keep theirs. The manufacture of guns and ammo will just go underground and nothing will change other than the law abiding public will be unarmed.
Trust me the federal government would love nothing more than banning guns. The second amendment was not put in place to ensure I could always have a shotgun to hunt birds with, it was put into place to ensure that US citizens would always be armed to defend themselves against a rogue government. True change on this issue will never come from our government it will have to come from the grass roots of society. All anyone in the media or government want to discuss is the gun but they don’t want to dig deep to the real root of the problem because a strong united American family is and institution far more powerful than any government or silly pop culture media could ever be. That scares them because it always comes down to the power to influence and the government and media do not ever want to give up their power to influence.
Kevin