There is no one in my life more different than me than him.

He's a former Marine, an avid hunter and sport shooter, a guy who does honest work with his hands and doesn't talk more than he has to.

And if I hadn't married his brother and he were asked to describe me, he would probably use a term like "bleeding-heart liberal" or "hippie." I wouldn't go that far, but you know, it's all relative.

Still, when I saw him recently, we found common ground on a topic I never expected: Gun control.

Like some of the recent writers to the Mailbag, he's nervous as heck that President Obama and all those Democrats in Congress are going to "take his guns away."

Around my mother-in-law's kitchen table, he launched into a list of exactly the kinds of firearms and magazines and ammo that he uses, and why he feels they're threatened by certain legislators.

I couldn't recite the list if I tried, but it was important to him, so I listened. My brother-in-law is an extremely responsible gun owner. He treats his personal firearms with the same respect and safety precautions that he did his Marine-issued ones.

And he doesn't want to be treated like a criminal.

"It's just…" he said, pausing. "It's just that there's nothing I love more in life than shooting. And they want to take away the thing that matters most to me."

Though I've only once been to a shooting range, and I'll never hunt and never own a gun, when he put it that way, I could understand it.

But here's where it got interesting: He didn't argue that his individual right to bear arms is more important than gun victims' rights to safety — end of discussion. Instead he said he understands where people like Rep. Bobby Rush, who proposed a broad-sweeping gun control bill in Congress last month, are coming from.

Rush represents the South Side of Chicago, and named the bill after Blair Holt, a Chicago honor student who heroically shielded a friend during gang shooting on a public bus in 2007 and died in the attack.

Blair Holt's father, a Chicago police officer, has dedicated himself to curbing gun violence against minors in Chicago — where 33 other students were killed in the same year as his son.

That's a world away from my camo-clad brother-in-law, but he recognized the deep social currents underlying gun debate in this country.

It's not just taking guns out of the hands of criminals, he acknowledged, because by the time they're criminals, it's probably too late.

It's more about poverty, inadequate education, and a lack of the sort of responsible parenting he and my husband received.

Something needs to be done, he said, it just runs deeper than guns alone — and he doesn't want to be punished by a remedy that only scratches the surface.

That's where we parted ways, argumentatively speaking.

If enacted, the Blair Holt gun control bill would require, among other things, that all handgun owners obtain a license for ownership and that all firearm sales go through a licensed dealer.

I doubt the bill in its current form would ever pass, given that nearly half of all American households have guns, and it would be a bureaucratic and much-protested mess. But I do think requiring a gun owner to comply with similar laws as, say, a car owner, is not such a bad idea.

My brother-in-law worries that any step toward tracking guns is a step toward taking them away.

Still, I'm hoping that if gun control change does come with new leadership that it can encompass the sort of compromise we made, while setting our differences aside.