America’s biggest gun problem is suicide, not homicide. Gun homicides (like all homicides) are declining. The majority of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides.8 It is one of the most compelling reasons for reducing access to guns. Greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide.
Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily. One study showed that 90 percent of suicide attempts by gun end in death, whereas only 10 percent of suicide attempts by other methods end in death.9 Guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting or poison. Just stalling an attempt makes it less likely to result in death.
Where there are more guns, there are more police officers killed by civilians and more civilians killed by police officers. On average, there are around one thousand people killed by police every year, many of those victims unarmed. Several websites track each shooting, noting details such as whether the victim was armed, whether video footage is available, and the circumstances that led to the shooting.10
Guns are by far the leading cause of death of police officers killed on duty. Ninety percent of all homicides of law enforcement officers are committed with a gun.11 What’s more, in states with more guns and less restrictions on those guns, more police officers are killed on duty. One fifteen-year study shows that almost one officer per ten thousand is killed each year in high-gun states, and every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlates with ten additional officers killed in homicides.12 This also explains why there are so many police-involved shootings in these same areas and why so many more citizens are killed by the police in the US than in other developed countries. So whether we are concerned about black lives or blue lives or all lives, we should care about reducing the proliferation of guns.
Though the debate on gun control seems incredibly polarized and divided, there is a stunning amount of support from both sides on specific policies, even from gun owners. Check out these numbers:
Policy Percent of Americans
Who Favor
Preventing the mentally ill from purchasing guns 89 percent
Background checks for private sales and at gun shows 84 percent
Creating a federal database to track gun sales 71 percent
Banning assault-style weapons 68 percent
Banning high-capacity magazines 65 percent
Source: Kim Parker et al., “America’s Complex Relationship with Guns,” Pew Research Center, June 22, 2017, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns.
Although Americans want to protect the right to bear arms, they’re very much supportive of many gun policy proposals—even more contentious ideas like more background checks at gun shows and banning semiautomatic and assault-style weapons.
Empirical evidence shows that more guns mean more violence. Americans support policies that reduce access to guns, but the fact is, we’ve been better at protecting guns than protecting people. This is the situation we find ourselves in.
Winchester’s dream of “scattering our guns as much as possible”13 has become our nightmare. We manufactured an average of 9,458,172 guns annually in the US from 2012 to 2015. That’s 25,912 per day. That’s 1,079 per hour. That’s 17.9 per minute. That’s 1 gun every three seconds.14
We need a new approach to reducing gun violence. Rather than demonizing gun owners, perhaps we should focus on cutting funds from the gun profiteers. Instead of concentrating on the issue of rights, maybe we should approach it as an issue of conscience.
eleven
In Guns We Trust
Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. Violence is thriving as never before in every sector of American popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy. Violence, not Christianity, is the real religion of America.
—Walter Wink
J. WARREN CASSIDY, a former NRA executive, once said that we should approach the NRA as one of the world’s great religions.1 It promises safety, power, control, freedom, and security.
Many may bristle at the word idol, since it feels old-fashioned and overly dramatic, but stay with us. In the ancient story of the Israelites melting their gold and forming a golden calf (Exod. 32), most scholars don’t think the Israelites set out to make an idol or worship another “god.” They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong and were convinced that their golden calf was compatible with their God. Moses had been gone for a long time, and they got anxious and started taking things into their own hands. We know how that ended—a couple of smashed tablets from Moses, a stern rebuke from God, and a gold cow that was thrown into the forge. Maybe they made a couple of gold plows out of it?
“You would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world.”
—J. Warren Cassidy, former executive vice president of the NRA
Idols are the product of us creating gods in our image, and that image becoming our fascination, rather than us remembering that God created us in God’s image. Somewhere along the way we have grown comfortable ignoring the image of God in each other in exchange for the idea that the image we have of ourselves is more valuable than the image we have of others. We must protect our image at all costs. It’s a long way from a place on the cross, where a man died because he saw the image of God in his neighbors and decided to protect them at all costs.
Idols and false gods do not belong just to primitive societies thousands of years ago. They change and evolve with every generation. We put our trust in new things that are not God. We sacrifice lives to things that make empty promises that they cannot fulfill. Idols never go out of style. They just evolve.
Idols are things we put our trust in. They are not God, but we treat them like they are. They take on a transcendent, magical character. We hold them with a sacred reverence that should only be given to God. We are willing to die for them and kill for them and sacrifice our children for them.
We give them life, even though they take life from us. From the earliest days, gun marketing made some huge claims. Colt advertised its pistol not just as an instrument for protection but as your “one true friend, with six hearts in his body.”2
Guns are doing damage not just to our bodies but also to our souls. They are something we begin to put our trust in, our faith in. We believe they will save us in times of trouble, deliver us from evil, take out our enemies—everything that the Bible promises us God will do for us.
In 1998 Charlton Heston, president of the NRA, after being given an antique musket, held it up like Moses holding his staff up to part the Red Sea (well, he did play Moses) and then said, “Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel . . . when ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument.”3 People in the audience erupted with excitement. The gun is not just a tool. It is an object of reverence and devotion.
Some May Trust in Chariots
In our world today, we take it even further than reverence; we actually have faith in our guns to save us. The word faith is an interesting one. When it was used in the ancient Roman Empire by the early Christians, it was very controversial because faith was a word reserved for Rome and Caesar. The Latin word for faith is fides, which is also where we get our notion of fidelity. It is about loyalty, like we would say, “He’s a faithful husband.” We tell people to have faith in us, to trust us. Faith has everything to do with trust, allegiance, and where our hope lies.
In fact, the early Christians were actually first called “atheists” because they did not put their faith in the emperor or the chariots and horses of the empire.4 They had lost all “faith” in Caesar and his empire. Their faith in God and God alone was a subversive claim. After all, Rome took great pride in its wealth and power and might. Every time the Christians said “Jesus is Lord,” they were also declaring “Caesar is not.” You can see why they got killed and jailed for insurrection.
One of the reasons we create idols is that they are visible, concrete, tangible. It’s h
ard to trust in something invisible, like God. The Bible even recognizes this complexity, saying that’s why we talk so much about “faith.”
Faith is believing in something we cannot see, but what we believe is just as real as—or even more real than—the stuff we can see. Hebrews 11:1 puts it this way: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
It’s hard to trust that God is our “refuge” and “deliverer” and will protect us from harm, as the Bible promises over and over, since we can’t see God. It’s much easier to think that our handgun will protect us. Guns become idols that we put our trust in—in part because we can see them. We can touch them. They feel more real than God, and we can end up trusting our guns more than we trust our God. But does God need our guns?
As the psalmist says, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Ps. 20:7). One of the constant themes in the Bible is that God is our deliverer—and the battle is God’s, not ours. “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord (Deut. 32:35 ESV). Another way of putting it: “Vengeance is not yours.” Only God can be trusted with ultimate power. It’s why God seems to really like working through our weakness rather than our strength. It is poisonous to our soul to begin to think that we have power and control over our lives, over others, over the world.
There’s a story in the Bible of an army commander named Gideon who went forth to fight the Midianites (Judg. 7). Like any good commander in chief, he rallied the troops—thirty-two thousand of them, to be exact. But God told Gideon, “You’ve got too many,” and ordered him to send some away so that he wouldn’t be tempted to think it was his own strength and might, or the power of his arsenal, that saved him. So twenty-two thousand head off, leaving him with ten thousand. God speaks to him again, telling him it’s still too many. Gideon then whittles the army down to three hundred—from over thirty thousand to three hundred. It’s not much of a force to be reckoned with against the mighty Midianites, but that is precisely the point. When we are too strong and armed, we tend to lose our faith in God to deliver us. We rely on our guns and bombs, the idols that are easier to see and trust in than an invisible God who can at times feel distant. That’s why living an unarmed life takes faith, and courage, and trust in God.
Think about the other folks God appointed to lead. Consider the fact that God chose a shepherd boy to be king. When Samuel was on his quest to find the one who was to be king of Israel, Jesse brought out his sons—all except David, whom he didn’t even consider a candidate. Samuel said to him, “Are these all the sons you have?” And Jesse replied, “There is still the youngest. . . . He is tending the sheep.” Jesse brought David in from the field. Upon his arrival, the voice of the Lord said, “Anoint him; this is the one” (1 Sam. 16:11–12). The anointed David would go on to be the young man who killed the giant Goliath, who was not only a big dude but an “uncircumcised Philistine,” the enemy of God’s people. But if you know the story, you’ll recall he didn’t do it with mighty weapons. He didn’t have an AR-15. No big guns at all.
The Scriptures say that even as everyone was preparing for the big fight, David was going back and forth to care for the sheep. And he couldn’t even walk with the armor they tried to put on him. Saul, familiar with violence (an understatement), loaded David up with armor and a sword, ready for battle. But David said, just like a child, “I cannot go in these” (1 Sam. 17:39). He took them off, grabbed a few stones, and headed into battle to face the nine-foot embodiment of power. He looked into the face of Goliath with his five-thousand-shekel armor and his spear, whose “iron point weighed six hundred shekels” (17:7). The story is much more a critique than an endorsement of power and violence. As with many Bible stories, it is a subversive text. Little David toppled the giant with a slingshot. That’s God’s power at work, in our weakness. Not through our weapons or might or firepower.
There’s a pattern in Scripture that continues to mirror that same thing—God’s power is shown in our weakness, not in our strength. In Sarah, a barren elderly woman becomes the mother of a nation. In Moses, a stuttering prophet becomes the voice of God. A shepherd boy becomes a king who defeats a giant with a slingshot. A homeless baby is the one who leads us home. God’s power is revealed in weakness. God uses the foolish to confound the wise, and the weak things to shame the strong. That’s pure gospel.
But it also flies in the face of our culture, where it seems naive to trust in a God who doesn’t always seem to show up the way we think God should.
Even Peter, when faced with the existential crisis of armed soldiers coming to arrest Jesus, picked up a sword. He stood his ground. He pulled the sword off one of the men confronting Jesus and cut the guy’s ear off.
Jesus responded by scolding Peter, telling him to put his sword away. “All who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). And then Jesus picked up the ear of the wounded persecutor and put it back on, healing the man. The message is crystal clear. The gospel of Jesus, and the way of Jesus, is nonviolence. Even toward those who are violent to us.
The early Christians understood the message. Early church father Tertullian said that Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.5 If ever there were a case to be made for justifiable violence, Peter had it. In light of Jesus, there is no such thing as redemptive violence, even to protect the Messiah himself. Jesus shows us another way—a way that we can interact with evil without becoming evil. It may cost us our lives, but we know “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). We have nothing to lose and nothing to fear. Even Peter ended up being executed, hung upside down on a cross. Many of the early Christians were killed. But they insisted that when we remain faithful to Jesus, even in our deaths, God’s love prevails. In the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, Tertullian once wrote.6 The early Christians insisted on this: for Christ we can die, but we cannot kill.7
Peter learned, and any of us who dare to follow Jesus must learn, that we cannot carry a cross in one hand and a weapon in the other. We cannot serve two masters.
Becoming Like What We Worship
Idols change us. They possess us. They capture our hearts. They require an uncompromising allegiance. They take on a false authority. They make promises they can’t keep. They ask more and more of us and constantly let us down.
Author Andy Crouch says that idolatry is seductive because at first it seems to work. But over time the idols give less and demand more. Some have compared it to alcoholism. You drink one sip, then another, and before long the alcohol is your master. You are its tool. What seemed to offer you control is now in control of you. Crouch puts it this way: “All idols begin by offering great things for a very small price. All idols then fail, more and more consistently, to deliver on their original promises, while ratcheting up their demands. . . . In the end they fail completely, even as they make categorical demands.” Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover memorably says, “Idols ask for more and more, while giving less and less, until eventually they demand everything and give nothing.”8
We can see that we have made idols of guns by the inability of so many to admit that guns can do anything wrong. “Guns don’t kill; people kill” expresses that well. We don’t claim the same about cars. Cars kill people. We know that. Sure, there is a driver behind the wheel (at least until recently!), but if that person had been riding a bicycle instead of driving a car, the accident would not have been fatal. Similarly, if the Las Vegas shooter had been armed only with rocks to throw, not as many people would have been killed.
Historian Garry Wills describes our gun idolatry this way: “The gun is our Moloch. . . . Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. . . . Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. . . . If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed.”9 We just don’t have enough guns yet. And so here we are buying to
ns of guns to protect ourselves from people who are buying tons of guns. You can only have a lack of guns, not a surplus.
Again, we are willing to die for idols, kill for them, and sacrifice our children to them.
[© Tony Auth]
Think of all the promises a gun pledges to its owner—power, control, safety, protection, deliverance, self-confidence, self-determination, ridding the world of evil. If a gun were actually able to keep all its promises, then we would be like God.
That may sound familiar. It goes all the way back to the garden of Eden. Amid all the organic, non-genetically-modified-or-artificially-pesticided trees full of fruit, there was one tree that the first humans were not supposed to touch—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God warned Adam and Eve that if they ate of its fruit, they would discover something called “death.” God warned them that they could not be immortal and know good and evil at the same time.
Along came a slick little serpent who convinced them that if they ate the forbidden fruit, they would be like God—quite an alluring proposition. They’d be the judges of good and evil, of what is beautiful and what is ugly. They would rule themselves and control their own destinies. We all want to be like God, right? They decided they couldn’t live without the knowledge of good and evil. Apparently death was a small price to pay for the possibility of godlike knowledge. And so they ate.
THE WHEAT AND THE WEEDS
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
The owner’s servants came to him and said, “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?”
Beating Guns Page 15
