I thought this was a curious stance, given his steadfast opposition to Obamacare, a hallmark of which are mandates requiring insurers to cover more procedures and people than they might otherwise care to.īut I realized that this stance came down to a distrust of federal intervention - not a blind trust in the profit-first mindset of private insurance companies. His solution was to pass a law mandating insurance companies to cover all forms of chemotherapy in the state. This was once made especially clear to me when a legislator explained his outrage that health insurers were willing to cover only certain types of chemotherapy and not others. State intervention, on the other hand, is still up for debate. Instead, I learned that conservatives just want the federal government to stay out of healthcare. Living in small-town Georgia made me realize something about the national healthcare debate that I had misconceived before.īefore, I assumed conservatives thought that when it came to healthcare, the government should never mess with private markets. I now see the gun-control issue as wholly irreconcilable and have tried to focus my political energy toward other issues. Instead, I found articles about a 2018 mass shooting at a Florida yoga studio. Writing this, I even Googled if others had shared this view about similarities between yoga and shooting a gun.

Probably because I was essentially standing in Warrior One position while mindfully breathing. So I shot my first gun ever as part of a sidebar to an article about skyrocketing gun sales in town in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.Īnd in all honesty, I felt the same way after shooting a gun as I tend to feel after yoga: relaxed and great.

My editors, on the other hand, were so shocked that I had never pulled the trigger of a firearm that they insisted I do just that for a story. Why? Because I saw how unbelievably emotionally attached the vast majority of gun owners - even across the political spectrum - are to their guns.īefore moving to Hall County, I had never in my entire life, beyond cops, been in the vicinity of a handgun, much less shot one. I resigned myself to saving my energy when it came to debating the ease with which Americans can get guns as a political issue after living in Gainesville, Georgia.

Carlo Caravetta of California tries out an Aimpoint sight on a gun at the National Shooting Sports Foundation's 33rd annual Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show at the Sands Expo and Convention Center Januin Las Vegas, Nevada.

When you hear its a big rich town