Pretty crazy guns

I think that they ought to let people ... have guns if they use them to hunt. And people who need guns — who need guns for their job like policemen and army. But I don’t think that we should just let anybody have any kind of gun and any kind of bullets that they want. That’s pretty crazy.

Jim Wallis’s 9-year-old son said that to his Dad at bedtime.  Jim Wallis is editor and main inspiration of Sojourner magazine, which publishes great sense about Christian faith, belief and action.  Jim is a 21^st century prophet. 

Of course he has to address, yet again, the gun issue.  What is often termed the American love affair with guns is suddenly yet again the foremost issue in the USA because atrocities where American psychopaths have run amok with guns have killed yet more children and teachers.  The National Rifle Association, hideously powerful and blind, is defending all they can see, the “Second Amendment Rights” of all Americans.  They know this litany better than they know the Ten Commandments.  The president of the NRA, often on TV at the moment, seems a reasonable, gentle, cultured bloke – nothing like the posturing idiocy of Charlton Heston, “...from my cold dead hands” – and yet Heston, it seems, spoke for  tens of millions of Americans unable to imagine life without their guns.  A very decent chap we once knew when we were living in Fiji is long since back in the southern USA, and he runs a gun shop.  It seems perfectly acceptable to him.  He is a Christian and a Southern Baptist officebearer. 

 

Wonderful people I stayed with in the USA told me that some of their friends could not accept an invitation to come and eat in their home.  Reason?  They chose not to keep guns at home and so their friends said they would not feel safe.  I think the issue is fear.  Living in fear.  It’s largely a choice, it seems to me. 

Part of the work of maturity is to make the choice whether to live in fear.  The choice is between finding your own ways, ways of faith, to live without being dominated by fear and in the circumstances and environment you choose, as long as you can – or to retreat into some protected environment such as a gated or retirement village or something worse.  Living without fear, it seems to me, eventually entails coming to terms with one’s own death and powerlessness, facing it down – deciding what survives that is of any consequence.  Mortality is the big scary enemy of the privileged, powerful, wealthy, and well-armed. 

Martin Luther King wrote: People often hate each other because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, they don’t know each other because they cannot communicate, they cannot communicate because they are separated...   But the wisdom of the National Rifle Association says:

 

the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

 

That statement, writes Jim Wallis, is at the heart of the problem of gun violence in America today — not just because it is factually flawed, which of course it is, but also because it is morally mistaken, theologically dangerous, and religiously repugnant.

The world is not full of good and bad people, he writes.  We are, as human beings, both good and bad.  This is not only true of humanity as a whole, but we as individuals have both good and bad in us.  When we are bad or isolated or angry or furious or vengeful or politically agitated or confused or lost or deranged or unhinged — and we have the ability to get and use weapons only designed to kill large numbers of people — our society is in great danger.

Long ago, somehow, I saw a gun for what it is.  It is a very efficient device for killing people or animals.  A gun is for killing, summarily ending life.  Working in the freezing works as a student I watched animals being killed in great numbers by special pistols, a bolt shot through their brains.  Large cattle beasts immediately crumpled and lay twitching.  I had to work out for myself the facts of getting and eating animal protein, and the facts of killing humanely – but I also noticed how the process took something from the humanity of those who did it.  I am not tempted to be a vegetarian, but I do grant the force of those who point out that most people who eat meat from the supermarket have not had to kill the animal. 

Guns are only for killing.  Some guns are hugely sophisticated and powerful.  In Switzerland where the male population is expected to keep guns, it is also a fact that all who have guns are required to have had military instruction in keeping, using and maintaining them.  They also have to keep their ammunition at the local police station or armoury.  Not so in the USA.  That would be an unconscionable restriction which would violate their Second Amendment and their God-given Right to Bear Arms.