Oops, Oh Well
Turns out there was another school shooting. Yeah, the one in Oregon, not the people who shot the cops in Las Vegas because they didn’t like the government – that was the day before, I think. No, in Portland, Oregon, at a high school, not the university one in Seattle. That’s been a few days ago.
Yeah, it’s a pity, really. The scared kids, the grieving families. It’s a shame. But what are you going to do? I mean, people have a right to have guns. You can’t take that away. It’s in the constitution. I mean, those Cliven Bundy fans who shot the cops and covered their bodies with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags were a militia of sorts, weren’t they? OK, maybe not the most “well ordered militia” in the world, but they had a right to their armed government protest.
And that guy in Seattle, well, sure, it was terrible, but you know he had psychological problems, right? You just can’t fix everything. And if you started taking guns out of the hands of people with psychologi
cal problems, where would it stop? I mean, if I go to a shrink because I’m feeling down, does that mean I should lose my guns? Really, over half of suicides are committed with guns? Yeah, I guess 20,000 a year or so seems like a lot, but what are you going to do? If you took away their guns those people would probably find a way to jump off a bridge or something.
It isn’t fair.
Some idiot is always wanting to take away gun owners’ rights every time a little kid finds a gun and shoots their sister or their friend or their uncle at a picnic. But you know what’s no picnic? A bunch of regulations that say what kind of gun you can have and where you can have it and who is or isn’t allowed to have it. If you want a gun you want it now, not after waiting around for a week while some paper-pusher pokes around in your private business to find out if you’re OK to carry. Why should responsible gun owners have to submit to a bunch of rules and regulations because of a few random events? Thousands of random events? Whatever.
Face it. You know what isn’t cool? The government getting up in your business. You know what is cool? People carrying guns in public. Did you see that picture of the guy carrying an AK-47 around the pharmacy aisle in Target? That’s a bad ass. Nobody is going to mess with anyone while that guy is around. Little children can feel safe when they see that guy with an assault rifle is in the store.
Yeah, I heard about the guy who stopped the shooter at Seattle Pacific University using nothing but pepper spray. Sure, I guess that’s pretty bad-ass in its own way. But then he wrote this pansy-ass letter about praying for everyone involved and how he wasn’t really a hero and how God helped him see that the shooter wasn’t a monster, but a sad and troubled man. What’s with that? Blow away the bad guys, I say. And for that, everyone should have a gun.
When Worlds Collide
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day about a controversy in her church. A member raised the question to the congregation about what their policy should be about bringing guns to church. This was not a question that had ever crossed my friend’s mind in the course of many years of church-going in Chicago, but she’s in another part of the country now, and the question is real. And, if you’ll forgive the pun, loaded.
There are members of the congregation who cannot fathom why anyone would carry a gun anywhere other than a shooting range or a hunting trip, and maybe not even then. They feel threatened knowing that there is a deadly weapon in their midst, and offended by the idea of bringing an instrument of violence into a place of peace.
There are also members of the congregation who, it turns out, have been bringing their guns to church all along. They see carrying a gun as an act of community service, a way to keep the community safe should it be threatened from the outside. Carrying a gun makes them feel safe, and makes them feel like they can contribute to the safety of loved ones around them.
It does not help that these two opposed and mutually contradictory views are also associated with differences of class and culture, making any conversation deeply fraught. It’s the kind of situation that doesn’t have a clear, correct solution, and the opportunities for offending people, for misunderstanding motives and assumptions, are rampant. There is no compromise. You can’t “sort of” bring a gun to church. You allow it or you don’t, and saying, “Well, just don’t bring a gun if you don’t want to” is not much consolation to a person who feels that they can’t settle into the prayers of the community knowing that a person next to them is armed and prepared to kill.
My friend wasn’t asking for advice, but if she was, here’s what I would have said—and I think it applies to the unsolvable issues that each of us has to decide on throughout our lives. When there is no way to answer a question, it is probably time for a deeper question. There’s no good way for this congregation to answer the question: “Should people be allowed to bring guns into our sanctuary?” But maybe it would be helpful for congregants to be in conversation with one another, taking turns answering the questions “What frightens you?” and “What makes you feel safe?” It might not provide a clear-cut answer to the original question, but it would provide a way for people to tell their stories, to approach one another less from a place of knowing what is right and wrong and more from a perspective of what Nelle Morton called “hearing each other into speech.” People could relate dreams they’d had about guns, tell of their own experiences with guns, tell the stories their parents or grandparents related to them in which guns meant terror or survival. These conversations might not lead to a clear answer as to whether or not guns should be allowed in worship, but they would help to weave the fabric of the community together rather than tearing thread from thread in a pitched battle over who is right and who is wrong.
There are plenty of subjects in this country which have become that kind of battleground: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, aid to the poor, climate change, etc., etc., etc. And it’s pretty much impossible to have a conversation amongst 300 million mostly unrelated people. Which is why it is so important to grab onto these conversations wherever we can: in our churches, on Facebook, with relatives and friends. As we slip ever more deeply into a culture in which differing opinions descend into obscenities and name-calling in the comments sections of news sites or YouTube, it matters more and more that we find ways to turn to the questions behind the unsolvable questions, that we hear each other into speech. If there’s one thing that most of us can agree on, it’s that society and government based in mud-slinging and sheer contrariness gets us nowhere. We need questions that demand that we put our full humanity into the answers.
Looking for Words that Help
Here’s what I’ve been musing about all week, as events of all kinds have folded and unfolded: How do we describe forces that are indifferent to human life and suffering, and does our description make a difference as we try to lessen their hold on us?
Here’s when I started to wonder: When President Obama, initially describing the events just unfolding in Boston, said, “We don’t know if this is the act of terrorists or not.” And I thought, why don’t we know? Isn’t random killing of innocent civilians in a way designed to terrorize an entire city—isn’t that what terrorism means? And then I realized he meant that we didn’t know if it was the act of a specific group which is defined as a terrorist group.
But does that matter? The ‘lone gunman’ who so often is the perpetrator of these violent sprees terrorizes no less because he is not attached to a formal group. The families of the victims grieve no less. The by-standers are no less traumatized. I think that the definition matters only if we want to know exactly who to blame, and for license to retaliate.
The owners of the factory in West, Texas, who repeatedly assured the EPA that there was absolutely no danger of fire in their fertilizer plant: Weren’t they also acting from massive indifference to human life and suffering? Weren’t they putting their profit and convenience ahead of the lives of others? Are the people whose loved ones died or were injured there grieving any less? Are the by-standers any less traumatized?
Or this: The U.S. Senate, despite pleas from grieving parents of murdered children, and survivors of mass shootings, refused to take action to limit access to guns by even the tiniest bit. How are those 46 Senators who cast the no votes (and refused to let the majority rule) tied to the future suffering of the inevitable next mass shooting which we know will occur? Are they responsible?
I’m not going to use the word ‘terrorist’ to describe factory owners, or U.S. Senators, or even the two brothers who wreaked such harm in Boston last week. But I am going to wonder: How do we find language to hold one another accountable, to demand that businesses, governments, schools, churches, and individuals care for one another?
Because one thing I have observed in my life: Individuals mimic what we see. Indifferent parents lead to indifferent kids. Crummy teachers foster crummy students. Ineffective governments foster ineffective citizens. Democratic society can only happen with democratic government.
So I’m less interested in knowing who to blame and how to retaliate, and more interested in creating accountability between us all so that care for one another is maximized and violence between us is minimized. I’m interested in finding the language that will do that.
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Guns: Relationship Status: “It’s complicated.”
I first held a gun when I was eight years old. One of my uncles let me fire his new pistol. I still remember the strain of trying to hold the heavy gun steady so he wouldn’t think I was too weak to try it. All these years later, I vividly remember the incredible rush of power that washed over me as I fired that pistol.
I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could spit fire and knock a beer can off a fence several yards away. I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could have ended the life of the uncle who handed it to me. It is difficult to articulate how much power surged through my little being. I swear I heard the Scots heritage in my mutt-blood swim screaming to the surface with a mighty roar…
Nine years later, the older brother of the uncle who first handed me a gun died after being shot by another family member. Not long after that, the father of my classmate was killed while responding to a domestic violence call. The man who killed him was devastated to realize, once he descended from his pain-killer induced high, that he had killed not only a police officer, but a friend.
Four years ago, my partner called me at the hospital where I was working as a chaplain to let me know that he was not one of the two white men shot to death a block away from my house (where a heroin deal apparently turned deadly). Shortly before that, I had watched an ambulance come claim the body of a sixteen year old boy, victim of a drive by shooting at the other end of my street.
I have lived in the rural life and the urban life and what each had in common was:
- a sense of powerlessness about how the world is run and
- deaths by firearms.
Our country (and colonial powers around the world) has a history of taking away a population’s weapons and property (i.e. indigenous peoples, Japanese-American relocation camps, mass incarceration through a government-created drug war…) when people in power decide to do so. How then, to trust that you really will be safer by giving up your guns?
Christian social justice activist and writer Jim Wallis proclaims:
Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values, and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity, and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made.
I confess that I am grateful to finally live in a gun-free home, I freak out just a bit when even toy guns are pointed at me or anyone I love, and I would love to trust that I could walk through my neighborhood at night without hearing gunfire. But I was also here in New Orleans when the National Guard rolled through with their Humvees and their guns and I know what it feels like to be occupied by a military force – first denied access to my home and property, then patrolled and subject to interrogation once home again.
My faith and my lived experience teaches that life is rarely an either/or proposition. In this interdependent web of all existence, we are all connected, tangled together in a tapestry of history and mystery. It’s complicated.
It is hazardous to talk glibly about gun control unless we talk about creating a nation that is welcoming, safe, and empowering for all people. This conversation is complex and deserves real discernment, not sound bites and bullet points.
Guns do not provide actual safety. They provide a sense of power. [Bear witness: our government is not at all ready to give up its guns, its sense of power.]
I suspect that if we are going to end gun violence, we will have to address the collective needs of all – urban and rural, white and people of color, individuals and institutions – who feel powerless without their guns.
What Makes Us Safe
It is only natural that in the wake of the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, the world of social media is awash with solutions, things that we should have done to prevent this tragedy, things that we urgently need to do to prevent more such tragedies, things that will make us safe. Some of these suggestions strike me as downright bizarre, such as the idea that we need to arm teachers so that they can protect their classrooms. Hmm…guns in the classroom—what could possibly go wrong? Some of these suggestions are, to my mind, flat-out offensive, such as the claim that this tragedy happened because we have taken God out of the schools, and that “God will ‘bless the USA’ when we put him back in it.” Really? God allowed innocent children to die out of a fit of pique over the lack of prayer in school? Who would believe in such a God?
Other suggestions make more sense to me: that we should limit the sale of assault weapons, or require gun owners to carry liability insurance, or that we control the sale of ammunition. Still other people are arguing for better mental health care, to which I can only say “about time.”
Unfortunately, the more I think about it (and like much of the country I’ve been thinking about it obsessively for days), the less I think that any of these solutions—including the ones I like—are going to really make us safe. By all means, let’s have sensible laws limiting weapons. But no, we’re not going to get all the dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. Or people who were never dangerous until the moment that they snapped. Absolutely, let’s give people better access to mental health care. But even if we could assure compliance with medication and therapy not every illness responds will to treatment. And we will never be able to know for sure the difference between someone who is dangerous and someone who is merely volatile.
And really, if you get down to it, even if we were able to prevent every shooting spree, that’s hardly a guarantee of safety. No amount of control over people’s behavior could prevent the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, or Katrina before that. As someone who lives pretty much on top of a fault line in California I know that a devastating earthquake in the area where I live is basically inevitable – a matter of when, not if. While I in no way agree with people like Adam Lanza’s mother who prepare for cataclysm by stockpiling weapons, given the ever-increasing effects of climate change, I would say that expecting disaster is not unrealistic.
The question is what we plan to do about it. We could prepare our children for the possibility of school shootings by sending them to school with a gun (as one parent is bizarrely said to have done). Or we could teach them to be kind to loners and misfits, to report or stand up to bullies, to tell an adult when another child seems depressed or distraught. We could deal with crime in our neighborhoods by arming ourselves. Or we could get to know our neighbors, and keep an eye on one other’s houses so that we are prepared to call the police if something seems amiss. We could stockpile food and weapons so that in a local or national emergency we are prepared to defend ourselves against all comers, prepared to go it alone. Or we could support increased money for the government emergency services that we are sure to increasingly need. And we can get together to fill sandbags when it seems like the floodwaters are coming, or find ways to share electricity with those who are without power after the storm comes, or offer shelter to those who have lost their homes.
This is what people did for Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. In the aftermath of 9/11 people poured into New York to search the rubble or support the first responders. When a section of freeway collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake folks in that “dangerous” neighborhood converged to help the injured and look for people who might be trapped. This is what we do. This is who we are.
The conservative entertainment complex and the NRA make a lot of money selling fear, and solutions to fear that involve scapegoating, isolation and the capacity to inflict damage before someone gets to you. And yes, that gut-level defensive reaction is who we are, too.
But we get to choose what we act on. We get to choose what we practice, so that when the time of crisis comes our habitual ways of being come to the fore. What makes us safe is the ongoing work of caring for the vulnerable; loving our neighbors; living, like the lilies of the field, in the beauty of the moment rather than in the fear of what might come. We will never be safe. Safety just isn’t part of this package we call life. But we can harbor one another, creating all the safety we can muster in this dangerous world.
“Guns Don’t Kill People”
OK, so what if we accepted that “guns don’t kill people, people do”? Just for the record, I don’t happen to accept that premise, since guns kill people a whole lot more efficiently than, say, knives or fists, but never mind. Let’s just take it as a starting place.
Isn’t it just possible that our culture of guns encourages people to kill people? Mightn’t the fact that it is legal in many states to carry concealed weapons to the grocery store or to church create an expectation that we NEED guns wherever we go? Might it be possible that memes like the picture going around Facebook of a gun holstered under a steering wheel as an anti-carjacking device teach us that the solution to being hurt or scared or offended or threatened is respond with lethal force?
Perhaps people do feel more secure carrying guns about, but it is a security based on the assumption that the solution to fear of violence is to escalate the violence. Maybe the guns themselves aren’t the root of the problem. Maybe the guns are the effect of an assumption that the way to feel safe is to become more dangerous ourselves. Maybe the ever more rampant violence is bred by a culture that says that if you have been offended, if you are hurting, then the solution is to make those who offended you pay.
What if we didn’t have the guns to back us up in that belief? What if we all had to admit that there are situations in which we are powerless or terrified or ill-treated, and there is, ultimately, nothing we can do about it? What if we had to accept that life is dangerous in more ways than we can count, and that pain and, ultimately, death is inevitable? Might we then come to a little more compassion for our fellow human beings who all share this lot in life? Might we learn to address our pain in ways that are more constructive—or at least less damaging to those around us? Might we try to find solutions to some of the systemic problems that drive people toward desperation? Might we, just as a “for instance,” learn to teach our young men that striking back is not an available option, let alone one that our culture admires?
Isn’t it time that churches started taking seriously Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek, and consider what that might mean for our society? God knows it’s time for some leadership to come from somewhere.
Being Good for Nothing
I suppose I shouldn’t have said anything. But letting these things slide is, shall we say, not my strong suit. So when a Facebook friend posted a picture of a gun mounted under a car’s steering 
wheel with a caption about it being an “an anti-carjacking device,” accompanied by her wish that this were legal, I just had to put in my $.02 worth. I suggested that, given the prevalence of road rage, maybe more guns in cars might not be such a good thing. Only maybe there was the tiniest bit of sarcastic edge to the way I phrased it.
And, as these Facebook conversations go, someone else responded: “Wouldn’t you be more polite if you knew everyone else had a gun?” I don’t know whether the conversation got more serious for the other folks viewing the exchange at that point, but it certainly did for me. We had just entered the realm of religion. Here’s the thing. No, I’m not polite because I’m afraid of people around me with guns. I’m polite (at least I’m generally polite) because I just think people should be nice to one another. I’m happier, they’re happier, the world in general is happier if people are nice to one another. It’s a basic religious principle. Like, you know, the Golden Rule.
But there are plenty of folks in the world who believe that we need the guns in order to make people behave. Deterrence is at the heart of their theology. They figure that the sure knowledge of hellfire and damnation is the only thing that can keep people on the straight and narrow. Without the threat of hell, surely utter licentiousness would prevail and we would be sucked down into a whirlpool of degradation.
It’s a point of view to which they are entitled, but a) there’s no particular evidence that the threat of guns or the threat of hell actually makes people behave better on the average and b) really, how depressing can you get? Would you rather live in a world in which people are polite out of terror for their lives or souls, or would you rather be part of a community of people who cared for one another because love is the great sustaining principle? Isn’t it better, really, to be “good for nothing,” to be good without hope of reward or punishment other than the pleasure of doing what is right, kind, honoring of our connections?
Sure, there are people who do terrible things, who break the bonds of community in devastating ways. Carjackings do happen. But is the world a better place when we assume that any person on the corner is a potential threat, or if we assume that the folks we see outside our windows are neighbors, human beings with worth and dignity equal to our own? Which perspective is likely to make you feel safe? Which perspective is likely to bring you joy? Which perspective is one worthy of sitting at the heart of your religion? Me, I’ll go with the love every time.