Tag: guns

Gun Control and Cultural Violence: Prepping for the Debate

Is now the time for stricter gun control legislation? Revising the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? It is too soon after the Sandy Hook tragedy even to discuss these questions?constitution_wethepeople

Ezra Klein recently noted that “only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. … [T]alking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t ‘too soon.’ It’s much too late.”

If the recent horror in Connecticut will at last lead to substantial conversation, debate, and action on gun violence in the United States, we’ll need more than emotional anecdotes and constitutional arguments. We need data.

We’ll need something more as well: a fearless assessment of the cultural climate in the United States that not only breeds but also glorifies violence.

Here are some initial thoughts concerning both, and please join me in collecting the resources we need to mobilize our shock and grief into action.

Data Difficulties
“Assault weapons” are difficult to classify yet generally refer to any weapon that has or appears to have the features of a fully- or semi-automatic firearm (the former fires repeated rounds with one pull of the trigger; the latter fires a round with each pull of the trigger without the need to re-load).

Fully-automatic weapons have been regulated since 1934 (The National Firearms Act). Legislation enacted in 1994 regulated “assault weapons” (the broader term that includes a wide variety of semi-automatic firearms and those that appear to be so). But this legislation had a “sunset feature” and lapsed without renewal in September 2004.

Does regulatory legislation make a difference in curbing gun violence? Data-collecting agencies and other organizations are split on this question. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to claim that such legislation is effective.

This question is so difficult to address, in part, because “correlation” does not necessarily mean “causation.” Just because, in other words, a reduction in gun violence correlates to the passage of legislation does not necessarily mean that the legislation caused the reduction. That said, correlation is not irrelevant.

Consider, for example, that starting with the Columbine incident, there were five mass killings between 1999 and 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired. Since then, there have been twenty-six mass killings over the last eight years. Consider as well that in all of the mass killings over the last thirty years, 75% of the weapons used were obtained legally.

If these correlations will have any traction in the national conversation we must now surely have, then we will need to do some serious soul-searching.

“Soul Sickness”: The Cultural Climate
Assessing the cultural climate is even more difficult than mapping gun violence data. A host of factors will need to contribute to this long overdue and challenging national conversation, including issues of race, class, drug addiction, mental health, and also media and pop culture images.

AK74 Assault Rifle with Firing sounds, lights, and vibrations (available on Amazon for $34.95)
AK74 Assault Rifle with Firing sounds, lights, and vibrations (available on Amazon for $34.95)

Given yesterday’s horrific specter of children as victims, one place we might begin assessing our cultural climate is with toys, especially in the midst of this Christmas-shopping season. The effects of violent computer games and television shows on children involve the same “correlation versus causation” problem noted above, yet surely this topic belongs to any conversation we need to have about a culture saturated with violent images.

Note, for example, that the now-lapsed assault weapons ban defined those weapons as having particular features, including: a folding or telescoping stock; a bayonet mount; a magazine that attaches outside the pistol grip; and a grenade launcher (among others).

Why those features matter becomes shockingly clear by doing a simple Google search for “children’s toy guns.” (The image posted here is just one of dozens when I did that search myself.)

In a society where there are nearly ten times as many gun stores as there are McDonald’s restaurants and children’s toys mimic assault weapons, we are long past the time for a serious conversation about gun contradvent_candles2ol in a culture of violence. Let us prepare well for that conversation by collecting the data we need and fostering the courage it will require to examine the deep sources of our discontent.

Let us also pray. As God’s peculiar people, prayer matters. And in this season, let us pray ever more fervently for peace…and the will to act.

American Idols: God-Talk, Part 1

There are some things for which we do not give awards but which Americans tend to idolize nonetheless. Today I’m thinking especially of individual liberty in relation to the supposed constitutional right to have weapons, as well as the murkier right to private property. (Gird your loins for this take on such Constitutional matters.)

We’re not likely to hear a conversation about liberty as a form of idolatry in our courts of law, but it’s high time to have that conversation in our churches. Is it really okay for humans to do whatever they want? Do we really want to codify that idea? Is there nothing that Christian faith and theology can offer to these questions?

As promised, this is the first of a three-part blog series on theological ideas and why they matter. And they matter not least for the people who were killed or injured in Aurora, Colorado today and for the many species that are, even now as I write this, going extinct on this planet.

St. Augustine of Hippo (North Africa)

I begin with this fourth-century quote from St. Augustine: “If you understand something, it’s not God.”

I take Augustine to be urging two things at once: to adopt a profound humility in our theological reasoning and to avoid idolatry at all costs. (Whether he himself managed to do this is beside the point.)

Individual liberty (a modern, western, Enlightenment concept) might seem a bit out of place in a cautionary tale about humility and idols. But I believe liberty might well stand as a cypher for western modernity’s presenting sin: putting the human in the place of God. This has been happening slowly but surely for about three centuries now, at least.

The many benefits of the Enlightenment’s stress on individual autonomy and human rights notwithstanding, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” come with a significant theological and, I would argue, social cost. Concerning the former: forgetting that Christian theological traditions have never understood freedom to be synonymous with the absence of constraint (spiritual freedom is always for the sake of doing something in particular not anything at all). Concerning the latter: elevating individual freedom over the common good (individual thriving is never an end in itself but something to contribute to the greater good). I believe both are illustrations of Augustine’s cautionary note about humility and idolatry.

Consider first the unrelenting, grotesquely well-funded, and usually vitriolic rhetoric of the National Rifle Association. For them, apparently, any gun-control legislation whatsoever is a pernicious infringement on the right to “keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

We are facing yet again another moment when U.S. citizens ponder the role of guns in our common life. I think it’s important to note that violent crime has actually been decreasing steadily in the U.S. over the last few years, but mass killings have seen an increase. I’m not so sure that tighter gun control laws would have prevented what happened in Aurora today. But I don’t think that’s the point.

I think the point is the stress on individual liberty, that the individual reigns supreme in all matters of social and economic policy. I believe that is a form of idolatry, of replacing God with the human. Christians should say so, regardless of the policy implications.

Consider, second, that every single oil well, gas drilling operation, and fracking enterprise relies on a murky notion of the right to private property. (In those cases, property owned by corporations, but apparently the U.S. Supreme Court believes corporations to be individuals. But don’t single out the Supremes on this. I’m always amazed that the U.N. General Assembly’s “Declaration of Universal Human Rights” in 1948 included “private property” as one of those rights, in Article 17).

Here individual liberty comes home to roost in some vexing ways. Can you do anything you please with the property you own? No, but the constraints are wildly loose, and just try arguing any constraints at all in some parts of the U.S. and be prepared to talk to a shotgun (see the first consideration above).

The very notion that human beings have a “right” to “own” property and do with it mostly as they please flies in the face of a very traditional Jewish and Christian concept: stewardship. I’m well aware of the critiques of the biblical notion of stewardship over creation derived from Genesis. That said, are the problems with the concept of stewardship more difficult to deal with than the free-range property rights of corporations and, yes, individuals?

“Stewardship” means that what one stewards is not one’s own property. It is entrusted to that person or community for the one who does “own” it — or in this case, the One who created it. Sadly, most Christians seem to talk about stewardship only in relation to fundraising, and the planet is in peril because of it.

I return often to a wonderful 2009 book by a sociologist, James William Gibson: A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. I believe his thesis can be reduced to this: environmental change won’t happen unless and until we cultivate a re-enchantment with nature. And we are faced with severe obstacles in that task on nearly every front, not least is the modern western view of “nature” as simply a “grid of private property” (page 72). Just imagine flying over the U.S. from San Francisco to New York. What would you see out the window of that plane? Mostly property lines – state, corporate, and individual. Where is the Creator of all this?

There are of course many other forms of American idolatry – the flag, the institution of marriage, free-market capitalism, home ownership, and the Super Bowl, to name just a few. And of course, theology itself can easily become an idol, and Augustine was particularly keen to guard against that.

I’ll make suggestions in response to all that in the next two blog posts in this series, including how we might think about creedal statements in Christian history and also how the “erotic” is indispensable to “traditional” and “classic” Christianity. So stay tuned.

For now, as a beginning, I’ll offer this: Extolling the virtues of individual liberty belongs on a slippery slope toward idolatry, to replacing God with the individual human. I think that’s where any discussion of theological ideas – liberal, conservative, progressive, traditional, radical, or reactionary – needs to begin. Are we trying to deal with an encounter with the living God, the Creator of all, or an idol?

As the holy month of Ramadan begins, perhaps our Muslim sisters and brothers say it best:

“There is no God but God (lā ʾilāha ʾillà l-Lāh).”

That claim could, quite literally and practically and thankfully, change the world.