Not One More

Not One More

It is enough.

We are done.

If you have nothing to contribute, stop talking.

Your opinion does not matter simply because it is yours.

My opinion does not matter simply because it is mine.

What would you do instead?

Does God judge a lack of care for the young?

When did we decide the young are collateral damage?

Inertia is no defense to doing nothing.

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

I, for one, was stunned to learn that the NRA used to be an organization dedicated to teaching gun safety and used to favor registration.  The New Yorker

I remain confused as to how and why that changed so radically that in my time, the NRA’s public persona seems to have abandoned the advocacy for safe gun use in favor of the advocacy of universal or virtually universal gun access.

Debating the issue gets us nowhere because it is not actually a debate we’re engaged in when it comes to guns and gun control.  It’s not a debate: it’s a shouting match.

But at the risk of wasting a bit more time, here goes: as simply as I can put it, what if we take the things folks are saying about keeping the guns as givens – that government might come and take what is ours if we do not have guns to protect ourselves, that gun control equals the potential for government taking of guns, that Barak Obama really is the antichrist, and nothing we might do to limit guns or gun access will work anyway.

Well, if our President really is the antichrist, then all these opposition measures will not matter one bit – the antichrist really doesn’t need laws to act, now does he?

And whatever the government might do, the fact is that those with guns who are angry or mentally ill in certain ways or whatever else that leads to mass shootings have already done what they intend to do.  And those folks will keep doing it, so long as their motivations, however obscure, continue to exist and so long as they have access to the instrumentalities to do the deed.

So, when I balance what has already happened against the fear of what might yet happen, I go with solving what has already happened.  And mass shootings have already happened.

And to the folks who oppose gun control, my question remains: what would you do instead?  If you knew a mass shooting was going to happen (and here’s the thing: you do know it is – you just don’t know where or when), what would you do to prevent it?

I’m listening.  Really.  What would you do?  (Don't say arm the populace -- the populace is already as armed as it wishes to be and that just hasn't worked, now has it?)

Here’s what I would do: I would experiment with laws and actions that have the aim of eliminating access to guns by those who would engage in such behavior.  I would be willing to be accountable to my fellow citizens about my own ownership of such instruments (much as I am accountable to you all for my ownership of a car).  I would be willing to sacrifice quite a lot to save children from such horrors.

That’s what I’m willing to do.  What about you?

And please spare me the conversation about what you won’t do or what won’t work.  We’ve done beat that dead horse enough, don’t you think?

So really – if you won’t agree to gun registration, to waiting periods, to outlawing the sale or manufacture for the civilian use of certain types of weaponry, what would you do?

And can someone please help me understand why so many of us seem much more frightened of the bogey man who might come (government take over of our lives old Soviet style) than the bogey man that’s already here (the slaughter of innocents going about their day-to-day lives by their fellow citizens)?

I really would like to know.

Guns & Violence & Problem Solving

So here’s the thing about guns and problem-solving – guns don’t solve problems; people do.

Sound familiar?

And here’s another thought that arises from bumper-sticker philosophy: if people kill people (rather than guns, as the bumper sticker so catchily proclaims), then it stands to reason that people are the problem, which means, does it not, that it is people that are not to be entrusted with guns?

Violence and gun-toting problem solving I have encountered in my lifetime has involved . . .

A man, now dead presumably of old age, who got so angry by the fact of a right-of-way granted by his father to his neighbors (who were also relatives) that he took to shooting at said neighbors (including a 60-year-old woman carrying her groceries into her house), gas meter readers, pizza-delivery folk, and anyone who dared to exercise their lawful right to ingress and egress.  Before he died, said gentleman yielded up virtually all his earthly wealth to said neighbors.  I wonder if those shots were worth it to him?  His cousin will never know if she’s alive because he missed on purpose or was just a bad aim.

Then there was the old drunk who lived next door to my neighbor.  While we painted her house, my then 3-year-old son played in the grass with his ball.  I had warned him to stay out of the man’s yard, but he was only three and when his ball crossed the invisible line of ‘mine and not yours’, my son ran after it, at which point the angry neighbor called my son a racial slur.  One of the men of our party reacted angrily and the escalating words prompted threats of the exchange of gun fire.

Then there was the man threatening to kill his wife in the middle of the street in front of my house one night, threatening to pursue her onto my porch where she hid behind me as I stood my ground with no weapon save a telephone to get him to back down.

Or the man in a divorce case who bore down on me in the hallway, just having lost his latest bid in court, his fist raised with threatening words on his lips as I slowly took off my glasses (so they wouldn’t be broken – they were pretty expensive for me back in those days) and simply waited my fate.  At the last minute, he dropped his fist and stormed away.

Then there were the young soldiers at the many checkpoints in Iraq.  The ones I remember stood before us, myself and a colleague and three Iraqi college professors seeking redress for the mistaken bombing of their university.  We were ankle-deep in mud.  It was cold.  We waited there for hours.  The boy-men soldiers were clearly uncomfortable treating me, the only one from the US in our party, so discourteously that they invited me in to their hut for warmth, but refused to allow anyone else to enter, so we all stood out in the cold, the only protest we had available to us for the refusal to hear these men.  And in the freezing hours of waiting, I heard about one young soldier’s pending divorce and the new baby he had never seen, having nothing to offer him save my caring ears.  And I heard their apologies – they had no choice but to hold us at gunpoint, you see.  They wouldn’t have shot us, at least so I think.  But to force the situation was to place them in harm’s way from their commanders.  So we simply waited, silent witness to the cold.  Eventually we gained entry and were heard and an agreement was reached.  Success.  Until a day later when the officer who had reached agreement with our friends reneged.  Apparently he could do by phone what he could not do face-to-face.  But that too was a violence.  And there were guns behind it.  Lots of guns.

What was the difference between the man who shot at his own family members and all the rest?  Time.  Time to better reflect.  So it was that the drunken gentleman had a wife who intervened, inserting herself between him and his desired shotgun.  And the man in the hallway, had he been armed, probably would have shot me and then thought about it.  But because he had the length of the hallway and only silence from me in which to think about what he was doing, he had the chance to reconsider his choices.  And the husband chasing his wife?  A gun in his hand would have eliminated the need to cross the street himself and stand face to face with us and reconsider.  And even the young soldiers faced no opposition.  All we offered in protest was our calm presence.  There were lots of folks killed at checkpoints just like that one and many of them meant no harm at all.  But those boy soldiers lacked the time to reflect on their actions and instead shot first.

What do guns take away that knives and fists and raised voices and other weapons do not?

Time.  Time to think.

And therein lies all the difference to the outcome in the world.

So if you want to know why I am in favor of controlling human access to weapons of such destruction, for me, it’s all about time.  And I am willing to give up quite a lot to buy the would-be shooters among us a little time to reconsider.  Because it might just make a difference.  I know it has for me.

When Did Barboursville, West Virginia Turn Into Baghdad?

In Baghdad, one of the innocent bystander victims of the violence there was a man on his roof (the roof is like an extra room to the house).  He peered over the roof to sneak a peek as U. S. soldiers on patrol were ‘sweeping’ the streets (I always thought that an odd turn-of-phrase) and one of them shot him, fearing, I suppose, he was a sniper.  He wasn’t.  He was just a man on a roof and he is dead.

This past weekend, in Barboursville, West Virginia, two brothers were killed as one showed the other the piece of property he had just bought in order to build a home for his family one.  As the property-owning brother unlocked the shed, his ‘neighbor’ shot and killed them both with a long gun of some sort from his own bedroom window.  The shooter told the police the men were on his property, entering his shed.  But they weren’t.  They weren’t on his property and it wasn’t his shed.  WSAZ

But even if it had been, when did Barboursville, West Virginia become Baghdad, where the order of the day was shoot first and ask questions later?

Our mistrust of others is a problem worth considering that I think is actually (or should be) part of the gun conversation in these United States.

What is wrong with us (or at least some of us) that we think our assumptions about people are so certain that we are 'free' to take deadly force to act out those assumptions?

When did we approve a world in which shoot first is even a possibility?

What on earth are we so afraid of? Statistics actually show crime rates going down.

Barbooursville, WV (like a lot of other places where this happens) isn't a particularly dangerous place. Why on earth have we nurtured a grudge-culture that assumes we are under attack all the time? When did the crazy lie become our defining reality? I know all the usual suspects. What I'm curious about is what we, the so-called ordinary citizens are doing to either feed or squelch the beast?

For the fact is that we do not live in Baghdad.  So why do so many act as if we do?

Ah Lord . . .

When It Comes to Banning Guns, What Would Jesus Say?

The truth is I have no idea.  Neither do you.  And the real question is not what Jesus would say or do.  The real question for a Christian is what would Jesus have me do?

It’s always at least a bit cheeky to presume to speak for The One.  That being said, and with (I hope) a big dose of humility, here goes:

1. He would have me listen.  Have you noticed what a great listener Jesus was?  Even with folks who didn’t (seem to) have much to say, Jesus listened.  And he heard.  To hear by listening requires stillness of spirit and mind, the ability to hear with an interior ear that discerns beyond the spoken to the intended.  No one tops Jesus on this, but we are all called, I think, to listen to others – especially, perhaps, to those who care about us least, who understand us least.  Even his words often seem intended not to be The Final Word, but rather to spur the conversation, the engagement, to newer, greater depths of meaning.

2. He would have me take him seriously.  John Calvin held to the notion that a person could even be killed in love.  I think he was wrong.  I think John Calvin, who, at least arguably, took Jesus seriously every waking minute of his life, got it wrong precisely because he failed to take Jesus seriously when it comes to the notion of the parameters of ‘discipline’.  Maybe Calvin chose Paul over Jesus.  But anytime we look at a human being as a disease, we’ve failed fundamentally to believe in the amazing and transformative power of the Risen Christ.   In the spiritual sense of the world, I have no need of protection from you, for you cannot do me lasting harm.  Of course you can hurt me.  But that is not the same as lasting harm.  If I take Jesus at his Word, I am not saved, but safe, from all comers.

3. In whatever context I make a choice, Jesus would have me choose wisely.  That is not always easy.  Nor is it obvious.  Wisdom requires a depth of understanding of all possible attendant consequences.  I seldom, if ever, am in a position to have such powers of observation and discernment.  Yet I am obligated to try.  I am obligated to ask, to seek, to knock at the door of the very heart of God to seek out understanding and become wise, wise in the knowing of God’s providing sufficiency.  Does this mean I am to reenact the posture of the domesticated turkey and simply open my mouth skyward out of a silly belief that God will magically drop food into my waiting mouth?  Of course not.  But I suspect it does mean that I am to take God’s promised providing seriously.  I am to take God’s purpose for my existence seriously.  Was I put on earth to assure that my vision of the nation-state of the US of A prevail?  Or was I put here for something far bigger?

4. I must always examine and reexamine my ‘sacred cows’ to assure that I do not make an idol of my own opinions.  I must perpetually resist the temptation to put my thoughts into God’s mouth, to make myself and my way my God.  I must be humble.  Perhaps that begins with #1 – I must practice being a listener.

5. If I would know what Jesus would do, I might do well to examine what Jesus actually did.  Jesus came wielding not the instrumentalities of death, but the instrumentalities of life.  It was risky, even dangerous.  And the tyranny of the state was the ultimate danger to Jesus.  He did not take Rome lightly.  Rome, I think, was merely beside the point Jesus’ own life and death was making.  Tyrannies know well what to do with force; they simply meet it with a force greater than.  That’s how tyrannies succeed.  Where tyrannies cannot compete is in the arena of ideas whose holders will sacrifice all to live out.

6. The radical proclamation of care for ‘the least of these’ was more than a bumper sticker.  The weak, the vulnerable, the unloveable, were and are Jesus’ table guests, his asylum seekers, his refugees, his beloved.  Thus are they to be mine when I am the strong.

7. Jesus was a Messiah of the now as much as of the not yet.  Repeatedly, Jesus deals with the person before him without regard to any thought to the ‘greater good’.  All I know to take from this is the notion that the greater good is standing right before me.  Perhaps this is as simple as understanding that tomorrow is guaranteed to no one.  Maybe it’s remembering that Jesus himself was killed out of the (misplaced) belief that his death could secure the protection of a nation from its tyrannical ruler.  Maybe it is in understanding that the proverbial terrorist with the nuke (the hypothetical justification for torture) in the right now of life is as important to God as the theoretical (as yet unrealized) harm he would do.

8. A godly life is a life of sacrifice.  At the launch of Sandy Hook Promise, one of the parents posed the question (I paraphrase): what wouldn’t we do for our children?  We inhabit a culture that teaches all around us that force and might are the solutions to our problems.  In this sense, we have become our own greatest enemy when it comes to violence.  One of the few things I hear in the many debates on all sides of the gun violence question is the challenge for us to change, to change fundamentally, as a people.  As hard as it might be to either arm or disarm, it is so much harder to do the work of change.  But do not the claims of so many lives challenge us to become something different – something that does not incubate and nurture violence as a problem-solving technique?

If I become the peace I wish to see in the world; if I do that work, the answers to things like gun control and how to create a safer world, will, I suspect, follow.  The question is whether I am, whether we are, willing to do the work.  I hope so.

In the Meantime

Guns, gun violence, gun laws, guns, guns, guns – it’s all the conversation, and rightfully so, given recent events.

Behind that stands the concept of predator and prey.

What makes children prey?  The fact that they are so small, so unaware of the dangers, so, so very vulnerable.

What makes a predator?  I wish I knew.  The potential list seems endless: societal factors (such as growing up in a war zone or culture of violence), nurture issues (such as growing up in a dangerous home), body chemistry, DNA (is it ancestral?), hormones, television and movie violence (what we see/experience affects us), some of the above, all of the above or none of the above.

The fact is that I really do not know.

I know that when it comes to physical violence, because I am a woman, statistically I fall into the prey rather than predator category.  But that does not make me immune from all the influences of and temptations towards violence.  It just makes it less likely that I’ll be a perpetrator of it than the average male in my culture.

Perhaps one fundamental (and unvoiced) difference between advocates and opponents of gun control laws is worldview: advocates believe violence can be controlled, reduced, eliminated; while opponents believe violence is simply part and parcel of who we (or at least some of us) are.

Can it be that both sides are right?  Or at least that both sides hold some of the truth in their hands?  Can it be that we are both a species bound in its violence and (at least potentially) able to be freed from it?  I think so.

Perhaps the cruelest irony of all, if my thesis is correct, is that those (this is a generalization – please remember that) advocating gun control also believe in evolution, yet by their stance on gun control, argue (at least inferentially) against humanity being held captive to our evolutionary place in time, while those who oppose gun control and largely reject evolution, embrace evolution’s strongest argument: that a species is captive to its ‘destiny’ - that is, that the species’ behavior is dictated by evolutionary necessity, which always contains unintended fall out.

So it is that advocates believe we can escape the dictates of evolution while opponents believe we cannot.

Here’s the thing: if we can’t do better; if we really are captive to a reality in which explosive violence, species upon species, is inevitable, then aren’t the gun advocates right and wouldn’t we all be well-advised to arm ourselves to the teeth, for danger is surely at our doorstep every minute of every day – right?

For myself on this issue, the facts on the inevitability of violence are largely irrelevant, for this simple reason: even if gun advocates are right, I choose to live my life as if they are not.  I perhaps am indulging a luxury: after all, I do not live in a war-torn country (although it could be argued, given the prevalence of violence in our society, that I do).  Regardless, I choose to live my life as I do, gun-free, because it’s more about who I am than who the other person is.

And who I am (or who I wish to be, in any event) is someone who holds life sacred . . . all life . . .even the life that would not hold my life equally sacred.

I don’t know how to prescribe a solution for an entire society.

What I do know is that I get to choose the kind of woman that I will be.

And who I choose to be is someone who is not afraid that she will die by gunfire – not that I won’t, but I merely choose not to have that as one of my fears (now spiders are another thing entirely).

I paraphrase freely, but Thomas Merton wrote that it is the duty of each Christian to embrace their own mortality, the recognition that some day, we will cease to be.  In that embracing, Merton believed, lies the true source of our freedom, for then we are freed to exist totally, only and utterly, in the time that we do have, for God.

There will be a day when I am no more.

My job is to worry about who I am, what I do, in the meantime.

In the meantime, I choose to live gun-free, not because it will make me safer, but because it will make you safer.

I don’t love either one of us that much.

But I want to.

To the Would-Be Mass Murderers Among Us

1. Every turban does not cover a terrorist.  Almost no turban does.  You yourself are the living proof that you can't tell a terrorist by looking.

2.     Call it anything you like, but acting on purpose to create fear and terror is terrorism.  And yes, I actually do understand.

3. White is not God’s favorite color.  God made the entire spectrum.

4. Hate is your problem, not your solution.

5. It may not feel like it, but God loves you too.

6. You do not have to do this.  It is a choice you can refuse to make.

7. If having a gun tempts to you to do something you know you shouldn’t do, get rid of it – right now.

8. It’s not a stranger’s fault that your life is not what you wish it to be.  Maybe it isn’t your fault either.  Sometimes things just happen.

9. The shift you are feeling under your feet is the change of time.  That can be scary.  But it doesn’t have to be.

10. Other people telling you to do bad stuff are not your friends.  They do not have your best interests at heart.

11. If you die, your death will not mean anything.  No one will remember.  Everyone gets forgotten given enough time.  Everyone.

12. Killing others will not make you important.  It will make you a murderer.

13. By holding on to that gun, pulling that trigger, you are creating the very world you say you hate.