Few subjects illustrate the stark philosophical divides in American culture like porn and guns. Obstensively, these are two of the nations most popular products. We create and consume them in numbers that almost defy belief. By at least one study, roughly 10% of internet use involves pornography. In 2012, Americans tried to purchase over 17 million guns according to reported background checks (this does not include illegal purchases or those exempt from background checks). Together, porn and guns are a significant part of our economy. They are also a great way to examine how polarizing our culture wars have been on creating effective policy and social structures.

Porn and guns have both been accused of being a public health crisis. Made more accessible by modern technology, critics of both fear a fundamental breakdown in our social fabric that threatens to destroy the nation. Our views on the subjects could not be more bifurcated.

For conservative critics, porn is a threat to our families, our marriages, our religion, and our souls. It is immoral, exploitative, and corrodes social norms and values. Few liberals defend porn with any vigor. Instead, it is viewed as an issue of free speech (1st Amendment), an escapist form of sexual fantasy, and as a human expression (be it sexual or artistic).

Likewise, liberal critics of guns view them as a tool of mass destruction that is literally killing our children, law enforcement officers, and the general public in ways both discriminate and indiscriminate. Unlike with porn, conservative defenders of guns are passionate and vocal in their opposition. You can’t circumvent the 2nd Amendment like that! Government overreach! Guns don’t kill people– people kill people! It is mental illness, not guns.

Last week, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times about renewing the conservative Christian crusade to ban pornography. His case was based on the notion that in the moment of the #metoo revolution a natural alliance could be made between liberal feminists and conservative Christians around ending the exploitative, morally bankrupt, and the sexually damaging porn industry. The ubiquitous nature of porn is blamed for everything from Donald Trump’s “Playboy Presidency,” to the grotesque male behavior in “Cat Person” and Aziz Ansari’s “ethnography of the degree to which millennial sex is a joyless mimetic spamming of half-remembered porn tropes,” to Harvey Weinstein and the apex-sex predators.

When it comes to depictions of people having sex used for private purposes and fantasies, created legally by consenting adults many conservatives can find a way to imagine altering our understanding of a fundamental constitutional amendment (the 1st) and provide heavy-handed government oversight. The 2nd Amendment is strictly hands off.

This is, of course, absurd.It is important to note that pornography is not unregulated or restricted. Like all forms of speech, we have found there are reasonable limits to that “freedom.” Porn, while nebulous in definition (I know it when I see it), has limits. Obscenity laws keep our public spaces free from images, videos, and sounds of hardcore pornography. Local communities regulate where porn can be sold or viewed. Don’t believe me? Look at some images of New York City in the 1970s and today. Thankfully, we don’t just let people produce and disseminate whatever sex stuff tickles their fancy. Ask Jared Fogel. This is right and proper. As a society, we have an open and running discourse about what makes for a healthy sex life and sex culture. We discuss and propose laws to govern the porn industry (see California’s Prop 60 attempt in 2016). What does and does not count as viable sex and porn continue to be debated and legislated. So too it must be with guns.

For too many on the right, guns cannot even be described as a problem. It is about personal accountability (the gun user is the problem, not the gun), mental health (the phony policy de jure), or quite gallingly a lack of guns.

If we can have serious discussions about the limits or outright banning of pornography, we can do it with guns. For one, guns pose an exponentially greater threat to public health. This is not debatable. They are tools designed to kill. Porn, for all of its seediness and exploitative tendencies, is not a death contraption. The threat as outlined by various anti-porn advocates is both nebulous and wide-ranging. Porn might be described as making young men more aggressive and less concerned with love, as Douthat argues above. They argue that porn is to blame for making men less interested in actual sex with their wife. Or it causes infidelity and sex addiction, as in the Duggar case (and many others). Guns are only an issue when people are mentally ill or misuse them with malintent that could never be stopped. But when it comes to male sexual misbehavior, it is porn that is to blame.

This is not complicated. There are and should be limits on porn. We can talk about changing them– and do. You cannot credibly ban it. The logistics are too impossible. Policing and enforcing any ban would be similarly impossible, from both an economic and civil liberties perspective. Any efforts to curb access to objectionable speech, like porn, must be coupled with a renewed cultural discussion on healthy sex, an understanding of what porn actually depicts versus what sex and relationships are like in reality, and what we accept as moral and just in our society. Likewise, there are and should be limits on gun ownership. If people keep getting killed in mass by the same sort of weapons it makes sense to talk about all the contributing factors– including and especially the weapon used to do it.

Our Constitution is a living document. Our laws are fluid, open to being altered and reevaluated as times change. We can, should, and must talk about how threats to our public safety and culture can be dealt with. Refusing to do so is accepting that the terrible things happening in our world cannot be stopped and will continue unabated. What point is there to crusading for the sanctity of life and marriage while allowing the wanton slaughter of our children?