Not too long ago, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., sent a letter to many people regarding gun control. On the cover of that envelope is a quote from President Barack Obama. On that mailing, Paul quoted Obama as saying, “In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds [to ban guns].”

The substance of that quote is dishonest and completely misrepresents what Obama said. The brackets used in it, unlike other bracketed phrases in quotes used for some of the Daily’s editorials, are in the original — and are the culprit behind the dishonesty. In a lot of scholarly writing, brackets are used quite commonly to clarify the original author’s meaning.

What the president said is quite different from Paul’s mailing. At a vigil for the two dozen victims of the December elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Obama said: “In the coming weeks I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this. Because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Regardless of Obama’s previously stated preferences or his secret and conspiratorial goals, reducing Obama’s words in that speech to “to ban guns” is an act of gross oversimplification.

It is no wonder that Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate cannot work with each other nor with Obama when the ideas floating around in public discourse are so reductive that they require taking them or leaving them in an absolutist, unpolitical way.

The world is a complicated place. Reconciling trillions upon trillions of facts of life to a few big, timeless principles is impossible — or, at least, is unprecedented. Although there are some attempts at defining the laws of human behavior, those laws are broken routinely. Like the verb conjugations in some languages, there are more exceptions to the rules than there are cases of the rules being followed. Coloring outside the lines is part of the human condition.

The ideas that we use in our governmental institutions to create laws and public policy, then, must also be complicated. They must contain exceptions, exemptions, conditions and be tied to current events. When the problems that prompted a law pass, that law also should pass, if it is not the main reason the problem no longer exists.

Reducing the complicated thought espoused by Obama to the assertion that his aim is “to ban guns” is nothing short of pandering to the anxieties and fears of the masses. It is demagoguery that can have only one purpose: the defeat of anything proposed by the president for the purpose of reducing violent crime in the United States. Saying that Obama wants “to ban guns” when he so clearly said something more complicated than that is an attempt to win a battle, not to better understand an issue and better resolve it.