In the wake of the tragedy in Oregon, I want to ask for you to think of something. I feel like this is a question that needs to be asked much more often during times like this: I want you, whether you’re a liberal, a conservative, an independent, or some other political stripe, to look at your “opponent” as a human being.

I can tell you what I personally want to come out of this, namely much stronger gun control laws, but there’s multiple problems inherent to this debate (a broken mental health care system, a culture that glorifies guns, widespread availability of hardware and ammo, little widespread understanding of guns in general) and it’s hard to distill them into one slogan or sound bite, and even harder to do that without destroying much of the nuance required to solve these kinds of problems. There’s also no panacea. There’s no pulse I can send from my mind that turns everyone to my way of thinking. We live in a world without psychic brainwashing. The President and Congress cannot simply decree Americans turn in their weapons. We’re a republic, not a dictatorship.

Yet whenever you turn on the news, especially cable news like MSNBC, Fox, or even CNN, you get no nuanced views on anything, only the sound bites that make problems like this so hard to solve. Furthermore, you get very divisive rhetoric that panders to their core audience while dehumanizing the rest. Watch enough cable news, and you arrive to either two conclusions:

America is under attack by godless ivory tower types from the coasts who have no idea who the REAL Americans are. They’re doing this under a communist Arab Muslim with an illegitimate claim to the presidency while immigrants take jobs away from actual Americans. Why can’t these people just learn that they’re wrong already?

America is under attack by corporate interests who want only to enrich a few already rich people off of everyone else. They do this through buying off congress people and state legislators and by appealing to the basest parts of our human psyche while THE REST OF US move on from such thoughts. Why can’t these people just learn that they’re wrong already?

This is a strategy  that is employed by almost every general in history, whether on the fields of war or in a game of Starcraft: division creates weakness, which you can then exploit.

Polls of NRA members by Republican pollsters show that three-quarters of them support background checks before buying a gun, and almost two-thirds of them support a requirement to alert police if their guns are stolen. But all we hear is the leader of the NRA saying things like “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If an organization wants to boast about its four million dues-paying members, shouldn’t it want to make their wishes be known? But that’s a damn good sound bite, sharp, to the point, and instantly memorable. And that’s all we’ll hear.

Its enough to make you lose faith in the system. Both left and right see themselves as mortal enemies of the other. Compromise dies first in a culture war, and its the only thing that ends any war. I may be a liberal, but I don’t see conservatives as enemies. I learn, eat, play, and live alongside conservatives. Dismissing any and all conservative arguments only prolongs a constructed struggle that turns honest attempts to solve almost any issue facing the nation and world into shouting matches where no real progress is made, everyone hates each other, and everyone has a sore throat.

Here’s all I want you to do as the culture wars surrounding guns intensify once again: really think about the issue. We’re in college learning how to think critically, on everything from Aristotle and Homer, to Chopin and Chinatown, to quantum mechanics and the molecular biochemistry of peat moss. It’s not hard to apply those same skills to political discussions. And when you do, please remember that the person you are talking to is a partner, not an opponent.