Beating Guns

by Shane Claiborne

  Guns in a house are more likely to be used on someone residing in the home than on an intruder. Suicide is a part of this, as well as murder-suicide (killing one or more persons before killing oneself). A lot of folks know someone who lost their life to suicide or have had suicidal thoughts themselves. Are there measures we can take to remove the most productive form of completed suicide from a home when the conditions merit this? Can we do this without stigmatizing the mentally ill? Part of the problem is our failure to recognize mental illness as a legitimate illness. But if we really believe in protecting people more than protecting guns, this should matter to us.

  Every one of these lives matters to God.

  nine

  Dudes and Their Guns

  Consider your man card reissued.

  —Bushmaster assault rifle advertisement

  A FEW YEARS BACK there was a massive controversy around a sporting game in Las Vegas called Hunting for Bambi, which described itself as “over thirty women ready to be chased down like dogs.” Men would pay $10,000 to shoot paintballs at women who were running across a field and wearing nothing but sneakers. The women were to receive $1,000 to participate and $2,500 if they avoided getting shot. The event was to be taped so that the men could watch it at home afterward. After the “hunt,” the men would have the option of “mounting their prey”—meaning they could pay to have sex with the woman they just shot. It turned out to be a hoax, but we’re convinced that the men who created the idea intended to move forward with it, if not for impending legal action. And the fact that national news outlets and the general public couldn’t figure out whether to take it seriously or see it as a hoax is part of the point. We live in a world in which this idea could even be conjured up. Was anyone surprised that it could be real? It came from a dark place. It never turned into something real, but where it came from was real. Hunting for Bambi never materialized, thank God. But toxic masculinity is still very real, and it often expresses itself in the form of gun violence.1

  Men own guns at triple the rate of women in the US: 62 percent of men compared to 22 percent of women. Men also commit 89 percent of murder-suicides, and 85 percent of all homicides. Of the ninety-six mass shootings since 1982, all but two were committed by men (and most were white men).2

  Guns are not strictly a male problem. Obviously, there are women who love guns and violence, and there are men who hate violence and have beautiful hearts of love and compassion. One of the reasons Jesus came to earth was to show us what God is like, and another reason was to show us what it looks like to be perfectly human. I once heard a female theologian say, it makes sense for God to have come as a man (in Jesus) to show us what a redeemed male looks like, to assure us that men can be loving and gracious and caring like God. Many of our dominant metaphors for God reinforce the violent theology that God is a warrior or that God sanctifies violence and war. My (Shane’s) friend, award-winning author Lauren Winner, once said, “You may have driven past some church called Church of the Good Shepherd to get here tonight, but I’m reasonably confident that none of us drove past a Church of the Mother Hen.”3 Both are biblical images of God. But sometimes we’ve allowed our masculinity to change how we understand God rather than allowing God to change how we understand our masculinity. We’ll take a closer look at some of this militant theology later in the book, and I have written extensively on this in Jesus for President and Jesus, Bombs, and Ice Cream, as well as other books.4 Certainly one of the things we need in the world right now is men who are healthier and less prone to commit acts of violence and abuse. We need men, and women, who are more like Jesus.

  We dudes have done some serious damage to the world, especially when it comes to the shedding of blood. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the inaugural murder of Cain killing Abel was a man killing a man. And many of the murders in the Bible, the wars throughout history, and the mass shootings in America have been done by men.

  While all humanity is fallen, we can especially see that violence is one of the demons that a lot of us men in particular need to exorcise from our souls.

  Each day in the US, at least three women are killed by their boyfriends or husbands. Domestic violence takes the lives of two thousand people per year, with 70 percent of those being women.

  Studies show that roughly a quarter of women who are killed are killed by a spouse or ex-spouse and nearly another quarter by a boyfriend or girlfriend. An additional 19 percent are killed by another family member. And in 72 percent of spousal murders, guns are the weapon of choice.5 It is one more reminder that even though we are conditioned to think that guns protect us from an armed stranger, most people are killed by someone they know—and often someone they know well.

  People with a history of committing domestic violence (predominantly men) are five times more likely to subsequently murder an intimate partner (predominantly women) when a firearm is in the house.6 A man’s access to firearms increases a woman’s risk of being killed. Not surprisingly, when Canada tightened some of its gun laws, homicide rates for women dropped by 40 percent.7 We’ve seen the same thing happen here in the US.8 Some local governments in the US are currently trying to make it hard for someone convicted of domestic violence to get a gun. And they have faced huge resistance, even lawsuits, from gun extremists, even though a majority of gun owners want to prevent domestic abusers from gun ownership.

  As we have seen in recent mass shootings, domestic violence is often a warning sign. It’s one of the consistent early indicators for mass shooters. Studies have shown that in murders and murder-suicides, a stunning number of them have a history of domestic violence. Simply put, people who are violent at home, with the people they know most intimately, are likely to be violent outside the home.9 Prior domestic violence is by far one of the clearest risk factors. Past criminal history in general is not nearly as reliable or predictable as domestic violence is. People who beat their wives or girlfriends often end up killing them—with a gun.10

  All of this is one more reason that taking action to remove guns from domestic abusers is a good move, even though states like California, where such measures have recently been taken, will likely face lawsuits for attempting to do so.

  From its earliest days, the gun industry has targeted both men and women in specific ways. Marketers have preyed on the need for men to protect their families and be in control. And they have used fear and vulnerability as a selling point for women. There was the “boy plan” that aimed to reach 3.4 million boys aged ten to sixteen.11 In the early 1900s, Winchester began a prominent ad campaign that claimed that “every real boy” wants to have a Winchester. Gun marketers even talked of the need to “win over the parents,” who were seen as the obstacle to selling a gun to a twelve-year-old.12

  Then there were the attempts to market to women, like guns that match any outfit, made in different colors. There were ads with beautiful women that said a gun can make you even more beautiful. One could argue that such an ad was also targeting men and encouraging them to make sure they find a woman who also likes guns.

  [Bottom: Vadim Kozlovsky / shutterstock.com; Top: Bork / shutterstock.com]

  But the women were resistant. All the way back to the earliest mass marketing of guns, mothers have led the resistance. And groups like Moms Demand Action still are. During the ambitious “boy plan” attempt to market guns to kids, one retailer complained, “I could sell a thousand rifles to boys if it weren’t for their parents.”13

  For men, guns became more than just a product or a tool. They became a totem of manhood or an instrument of adoration. Guns became more than a symbol and were a physical manifestation of power and control and, as in one Bushmaster ad, a “man card.”

  We’ve made heroes out of men with guns—from Rambo and Clint Eastwood to characters in old Westerns and mafia movies. For those of us who seek to be like God, we look to Jesus, not to Hollywood, to see what it means to be a man—and to be human. The gun industry has recently tried to challenge even that, making a bu
mper sticker that says, “If Jesus had a gun he’d still be around.”

  Men headed up most corporate enterprises in the nineteenth century, so it’s not that surprising to see how male-heavy the gun industry was. Women didn’t even have the right to vote while the Second Amendment was being debated and guns were scattering across the country.

  The business of death undoubtedly took a toll on everyone, whether they realized it or not. Just as soldiers talk about the “moral injury” of the cost of war on their conscience, we can see some of the same scars on the conscience of the trademark names of the gun empire. Colt’s own brother committed suicide, and the family tree of the gun market—Winchester, Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson—carried a lot of heavy baggage from the family business. After all, their names were becoming colonized by the gun empire, synonymous with weapons that were taking a pretty bloody toll on the world. What must happen when your family name becomes associated more with death than with life? Perhaps the women felt it most acutely.

  The Gun Fortune’s Effect on Women14

  Sarah Winchester was the wife of William Wirt Winchester, who was the only son of Oliver Winchester. She became the matriarch of the Winchester dynasty. The legend is that she was haunted by the souls lost to guns from which her family gained their fortune.

  Sarah was rumored to have dipped into Spiritualism, a fusion of religious beliefs in which ideas like karma and mysticism connect, which was very popular at the time, especially among wealthy women. The Spiritualist movement made some strong statements about racism, violence, and the degradation of the earth. There was a value for life and a desire to connect with the spirits of those who had died. Spiritualist leaders saw the universe as a profoundly interconnected web of life, which one leader described as a “most sensitively attuned harp.” Your actions had reactions in the spiritual realm. Here’s how one Spiritualist guru put it: “All that has been wrong, must be atoned for. We must, in some way, make atonement for every thought, word, and deed which has wounded, wronged or injured.”

  With her Winchester fortune, Sarah moved about as far from the gun empire as she could—from her home in Connecticut to California. And she began building a house for herself on a plot of land known as Llanda Villa. It wasn’t just any house. It’s one of the most perplexing houses in the world, not because it is ritzy and luxurious but because it was confusing and compulsively built. The mansion, built over a period of thirty years, has 200 rooms, 7 stories, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 150,000 panes of glass, and over 7 miles of sprinklers. Worth $130 million in today’s money, it was the most expensive residence in the country.

  Sarah Winchester [Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons]

  The house was a maze; much of it is still around. Staircases lead to dead ends at ceilings. Doors open into walls. There are trap doors and spy holes. It was built incessantly. As soon as something was finished, Sarah would tear it down and rebuild. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it—she simply was obsessed with building and tearing down and building again.

  Sarah wore a black veil and was a mysterious woman. Folks who knew her were clear—she was not “crazy,” she was haunted. She was not insane, she was tormented.

  We may never know with certainty what haunted her, but I think we can take a guess.

  In the ghost story of Sarah Winchester, she was haunted by the spirits of those killed by Winchester guns. She built her home as a maze to trick and confuse the spirits. She is said to have told a friend, “They must never be able to find their way through my house. . . . Each year I will add new rooms so that the spirits will go weary of trying to get to me.”

  It may be that the “moral agnosticism” and the absence of conscience so evident in the men involved in the business of guns all fell on her shoulders, just as the stocks did. Having a moral conscience may not have been a part of the world of selling Winchesters, but it was a part of the world of Sarah Winchester.

  Winchester estate [Sanseven / Shutterstock.com]

  Author Pamela Haag does a magnificent job juxtaposing the madness of Sarah with the madness of the gun business. As Sarah was obsessively building her enormous mansion, businesses were obsessively building their gun factories. In the darkness of the night, twenty-four hours per day, you could hear the hammers in California and in Connecticut. One was a massive compound for war; the other was a massive attempt to bring peace and to calm the spirits of the dead. Haag says that Sarah could have built a university, but instead she built the mansion. She could have built a church like the Colt family did. But that would only “morally whitewash” the blood fortune and try to convert it into something “impeachable.” Maybe she didn’t want it to yield something good. Maybe she just wanted to expose the insanity of it all. In the words of Haag, “Maybe she did not want to rehabilitate the fortune but to show instead the immutable deformity at its heart.”

  These are the words of Sarah Winchester: “War is now a sad reality . . . although it seems more remote from me than from my eastern friends.” She could not escape the spirits of the dead, but she did manage to leave the business of guns and death far behind.

  A cross adorned with guns at the Colt church [Shane Claiborne]

  At one point, the gun enthusiast (and president of the United States) Theodore Roosevelt expressed a desire to pay Sarah a visit in 1897. Unsurprisingly, she did not accommodate his visit but is noted as saying that she was not one to have guests in her home.

  Sarah Winchester exposes a collision in America between male ambition and female conscience. Who was truly pathological? Sarah spent her life trying to find peace, while her family business made wars possible. Perhaps she was eventually comforted after all her penance, and the Winchester businessmen are now the ones who are haunted.

  In the words of Pamela Haag, “It is feasible to poise (male) ambition and (female) conscience against each other along a fault line of American character.”15

  Elizabeth Colt’s gun sanctuary [Shane Claiborne]

  Incidentally, Elizabeth Colt had a very different response to her gun fortune—she built a church. It seems like a reasonable way to try to redeem and reconcile money amassed from gun sales, but it is an eerie thing to see. I (Shane) went to visit it a little while ago. On the front door, the columns are lined with guns sculpted into the cement. The cross is surrounded with guns. As you take a close look at a beautiful stone flower sculpted into the door, you see that the center of the flower is the barrel of a revolver. The fusion of faith and guns is everywhere in America, but nowhere as explicitly as guns carved into the architecture of a place where people worship the Prince of Peace. I’m not sure which is more disturbing: Sarah Winchester’s haunted mansion or Elizabeth Colt’s gun sanctuary.

  Wounded Healers

  Just as guns were a man’s business and have become the “man card” for a kind of toxic masculinity in America, women have been at the heart of the resistance. Over and over, women have used their wounds to expose the pain caused by gun violence, and women have used their tears as a balm to prevent further pain.

  Laurie Works [Rex Harsin]

  Laurie Works

  Laurie Works is a resilient woman who has used her wounds to help heal the world of violence. On Sunday, December 9, 2007, Laurie and her family started their day like many others. They drove from Aurora to Colorado Springs to attend New Life Church. After the service, they were walking to their van, trying to figure out where they would eat lunch. As they were getting into their van, Matthew Murray began shooting at them. It later came to light that Murray was also the shooter at a Youth With A Mission (YWAM) campus earlier that morning.

  Murray’s bullets struck Laurie’s dad, David, who survived, and took the lives of two of Laurie’s sisters, Rachel and Stephanie (Laurie’s twin). Laurie often recalls thinking in the midst of it all, “I’m going to need counseling.” That moment was the beginning of her journey toward becoming a wounded healer.

  When the family’s pastor suggested that they meet with the paren
ts of the shooter, they were prepared to do so (in large part because of the family’s previous exposure to restorative justice). The meeting happened just a few months after the shooting.

  Laurie marching at Demand the Ban [Rex Harsin]

  Years later, Laurie penned a poem written to Matthew Murray highlighting how similar they were, two sides to the same coin. One beautiful portion of the poem reads:

  Mettle isn’t about bullets and bridges

  It’s about meeting the darkness and naming it holy

  So instead of a bridge I’m building an altar

  To both the sides of this same coin

  To believing in my own darkness as fiercely as I believe in your light

  To the complexity of being human16

  Just as we speak of seeing the image of God in one another, Laurie alludes to seeing our own capacity for darkness as well. Like seeing God in others, we must also be aware of our capacity to hurt. Laurie gives us a window to see this. She explored getting a concealed carry permit and completed the classes, but when it came time to decide if she wanted to own a gun, she ultimately decided she couldn’t put someone else through what she has battled since she lost her sisters.

  Sadly, this wasn’t the only shooting Laurie has been connected to. She knew people in the theater in Aurora when a man opened fire during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. She found herself taking food and water to first responders after the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs. She lived in the neighborhood where a man openly carried an AR-15 and killed three people: two women on a porch, and a military vet riding his bike who came out of the alley at the wrong time. She lived in an apartment where a neighbor would randomly fire his gun at night, even to the point that one night she left because his shooting began to hit the apartment building.