Jordan is not alone. We know the names of the victims of gun violence, racial violence, and police violence.
A Parable for Our Time
There’s a story Jesus told that has everything to do with the world we live in, and it is a reminder that violence is not a new thing, even though guns may be the newest expression of violence. It’s a story that may be familiar to some and new to others. Try to hear it with fresh ears and allow it to speak into our current context.
MEMORIAL TO BLACK BODIES
This is a list of only some of those killed by law enforcement officers with guns. There are others who were killed without guns, such as Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray.
Michael Brown Samuel Dubose
Tamir Rice Jeremy McDole
Philando Castile Ricky Ball
Alton Sterling Jamar Clark
Kathryn Johnston Keith Lamont Scott
Walter Scott Anthony Lamar Smith
Jordan Edwards Sylville Smith
Terence Crutcher John Crawford III
Rekia Boyd Dontre Hamilton
Laquan McDonald Rumain Brisbon
Akai Gurley Ezell Ford
Eric Harris Botham Shem Jean
William Chapman II _____________ (for the
new victims that are being
added constantly)
Michael Brown memorial [Shane Claiborne]
It comes from the Gospel of Luke (10:25–37). The backdrop for the bit we will read is that a very religious man, an “expert in the law,” is trying to “test” Jesus, so he asks what someone must do to “inherit eternal life.” Jesus answers in characteristic Jesus style. He tosses the question back and says essentially, “You tell me” (we’re paraphrasing a little bit). After all, the man is an expert in the law. The man replies by saying that we need to love God and love our neighbors. Jesus says, “Exactly.” Part of the point seems to be that sometimes we know what we need to do—we just don’t do it.
The man goes on. “Who is my neighbor?” Perhaps he is also wanting to know who is exempt from love and compassion. Who is he not required to love or care for?
Then comes our story.
In reply Jesus says:
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”
Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?
The story has some beautiful treasures of wisdom, especially in relation to our conversation here about guns and violence.
The religious folks do nothing in response. They pass by on the other side of the road. Perhaps they offered their “thoughts and prayers” as they passed by. Maybe they were late for a trustee meeting or for a worship service. Maybe they were scared, as the bandits could have still been around. Maybe they were just timid.
Then comes the Samaritan—who by every definition was a social outcast. Samaritans were shunned for many reasons. They were a mixed-race people and were frowned on for that reason. They didn’t have orthodox religious beliefs about how and where you worship God. Good religious folks didn’t even associate with Samaritans, and they went out of their way to avoid them. But here the Samaritan is the one who responds—the unlikely hero. The text actually says he was moved with compassion, a word that we have made too fluffy. It meant that you were stirred in the deepest part of your gut, moved in the innermost part of your being. A better translation might be “gut-wrenched.” And so he goes to great lengths to take care of the man, at great cost and perhaps grave risk to himself. The point is clear—the people who you think would respond, the quintessential religious folks, are apathetic (just as many of our politicians and preachers are today). And the hero is someone we might least expect. He may not have had all the right beliefs, but he had the right compassion. He may not have had everything right in his head, but he had things right in his heart. The true test of our faith is how it moves us in compassion for the most vulnerable people in our world. And don’t forget, it was an expert in the law trying to test Jesus that provoked the story to begin with.
It’s also noteworthy that we don’t know much about the person in the ditch, the victim of violence. The two major ways of identifying his cultural or social identity have been stripped away. He is naked, so any clues his clothing could offer about his origin or religion are gone. And he is unconscious, so his dialect, language, or accent couldn’t help either. That seems to be part of the point. All that we know is that the person is human. He is a child of God made in the image of God. We don’t know his politics or theology or social status or sexual identity. To put it in today’s terms, he could be a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a liberal, a Muslim or a Jew, a Nazi or an anti-fascist. He could have been a saint or a rival gang member. But his life matters. He is made in the image of God.
Memorial to the Lost
3300 BLOCK, H STREET, PHILADELPHIA (AUGUST 23, 2018)
This shooting took place in Shane’s neighborhood, around the corner from where he lives. It happened during the writing of this book. Two men armed with a military-style assault rifle and a handgun opened fire, shooting more than thirty bullets in less than one minute, killing twenty-three-year-old Anthony Torres and thirty-eight-year-old Jose Vega.
These two men died less than fifty yards from where Shane had been writing this book about ending gun violence. This memorial is to them and to all the people who are alive right now but whose lives will be cut short by gun violence in the days ahead unless we take action.
[Shane Claiborne]
Finally, the story also reminds us that we need to walk the streets where people get beat up. The story would have never happened if people had not been walking the Jericho road. Some of us have moved away from the streets where people get beat up. We need to lean into the places of pain and draw closer in proximity to the suffering of our world. It’s possible to live our lives unaffected by violence because we have insulated ourselves from the suffering of the world. The story also reminds us that people get beat up at inconvenient times. No doubt, the Samaritan was on his way somewhere, just like the religious folks, but the Samaritan allowed his agenda to be interrupted by another person’s tragedy. We must interrupt our business as usual to respond to the tragedies and not grow numb to the pain.
Martin Luther King Jr. adds one more powerful dimension to this story that is directly relevant to our gun conversation. He invites us to remember that we are all called to be the good Samaritan and lift our neighbor out of the ditch. But after you lift so many people out of the ditch, you start to think: maybe we need to reimagine the road to Jericho so that people don’t keep ending up in the ditch to begin with. Here are King’s words: “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. . . . True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”7
Fearless Love
From the earliest days of the gun, fear has been one of our biggest motivations. Even the gun capitalists know that. Here is one contributor to Shooting Industry magazine, writing about how to use fear to drive gun sales: “Customers come to you every day out of fear. Fear of what they read in the newspaper. Fear of what they watch on the 11 o’clock
news. . . . Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to sell them confidence in the form of steel and lead. An impulse of fear has sent that customer to your shop, so you want a quality product in stock to satisfy the customer’s needs and complete the impulse purchase.”8 Wally Arida, the publisher of Gun Games magazine, put it like this: “We scare them to buy one gun. Now let’s get these people shooting their guns and educate them to buy more guns. We should tell them, ‘Now you have your defense gun, now you need to buy a gun to shoot this sport and another one to shoot this other sport.’”9
THINGS MORE LIKELY TO KILL YOU THAN A TERRORIST
(Note) Have you ever thought about whether your fears are justified? Or whether the media has accurately portrayed what—and who—is really dangerous?
A study done by the Cato Institute showed that while many people in the US fear being killed by a refugee terrorist, only three deaths in the past forty years have been attributed to terrorists who were refugees. That’s a chance of one in 3.6 billion that a refugee will kill you. More likely you will be killed by stairs, police, roller coasters, hot water, a bathtub, swing sets, state execution, texting, cows, TVs, or a vending machine falling on you.
Of all Americans killed by terrorists, nearly twice as many were killed by homegrown terrorists than by Islamic terrorists—and most of those terrorists were white.
Even outside the US, for every one American killed by an act of terror anywhere in the world in a year, more than 1,049 US citizens died from guns.
Violence often begins with fear. But never forget: love casteth out fear. Much of our theology is fundamentally rooted in fear. It’s about escaping suffering, either in this life or in the next. Fear of hell. Fear of dying. Fear of scarcity. Fear of not making a difference in the world. So we have fire-and-brimstone preachers of old (and yes, there are a few left today), and we have the prosperity preachers of today talking about how God wants you to be rich, to find your destiny, to “name and claim” your blessings from God. As you take away the layers, you find very little that resembles Jesus and the teachings of the early church. They were fearless. They mocked death with their courage and their enemy-love.
When I (Shane) was in Afghanistan, I learned the difference between fear and being scared. I went with a group of incredible peacemakers from around the world. Several of them have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and one—Mairead Maguire—actually won it for her work in Northern Ireland. We were meeting with some women who had escaped unimaginable circumstances under the Taliban. Mairead was sharing her riveting, heroic life story, and one of the women asked, “Were you ever scared?” Mairead paused and responded tearfully: “Of course we were scared. But being scared is different from fear. Being scared is perfectly normal. Fear is when we let being scared stop us from what love requires of us.”
We live in a scary world. Evil is real. Violence is everywhere and has many forms—hate crimes, bullying, sexual assault. But the promise of Scripture is that “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). Fear doesn’t stand a chance against love.
Jesus came to set us free from fear, from possessions, even from ourselves. He said things like, If you want to find your life, lose it (Matt. 10:39). If you want to be free, look at the lilies and the sparrows (Matt. 6:26–30). If you want to enter the kingdom of God, come in like a child (Mark 10:15)—vulnerable, free from fear, not worried about tomorrow, entirely dependent on God. We adults get so obsessed with our lives, our possessions, our need to make a difference, that we lose sight of why we are here. We are here to worship God with our whole lives.
St. Francis, one of history’s great peacemakers, is attributed with saying that the more stuff we have, the more clubs we need to protect it. Our possessions begin to possess us. And so do our guns. To live without fear is to live like Jesus—like a child, like the lilies and the sparrows.
That doesn’t mean everything is going to turn out perfect. Look how things ended up for Jesus: he got killed. Peter got killed. Most of the disciples and many of the early Christians got killed. But their lives were seeds. The movement of God’s love spread through their deaths just as it spread through their lives.
Consider Martin Luther King Jr. He was fearless. He knew there was a force stronger than fear in the world. He knew that love would wear evil down.
We can stand up before our most violent opponent and say: . . . Do to us what you will and we will still love you. . . . Throw us in jail. . . . Threaten our children and bomb our homes, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.10
Grace has the power to dull even the sharpest sword. There is something in the world that is more powerful than fear: love. Nothing in the world—nothing—is more powerful than love.
seventeen
Commonsense Change
We don’t need gun control; we need bullet control. If the bullets cost $5,000 you are going to think twice before you shoot someone. And there will be a lot less stray bullets and innocent bystanders.
—Chris Rock
AFTER THE SANDY HOOK SHOOTING, President Barack Obama made a passionate plea for simple, “commonsense” gun legislation. At the time, 90 percent of Americans backed him up. But the 10 percent held the 90 percent hostage. It is perhaps the biggest, most surprising victory of the NRA in its history.
We have not found the balance between an individual’s right to have a gun and the public’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—both of which are American treasures.
We cannot honestly, accurately continue to call gun deaths and mass shootings “accidents.” The dictionary offers this definition of the word accident: “an unforeseen or unplanned event or circumstance,” or “an unexpected happening causing loss or injury which is not due to any fault or misconduct.”1
By definition, it is difficult to say that thirty-eight thousand gun deaths per year are “accidents.” After all, it is entirely predictable, easily foreseeable, and very much expected, just as much as it is tragic, heart-wrenching, and horrific.
What we so often call an accident may more accurately be called willful negligence, which, it is worth noting, is a crime. The truth is, we cannot prevent all violence, from guns or from anything else. We can’t stop all suicides. But we can save some lives if we want to—perhaps many lives.
Here are a few things we might consider: Might it be time to say that automatic and high-capacity semiautomatic guns do not belong on our streets? Semiautomatic guns make up a large portion of guns available for purchase. Should we limit a gun, and the clips that hold the bullets, to, say, six bullets? When would anyone really need to fire off one hundred rounds in one minute? Some guns are designed to kill as many people as possible in as little time as possible. Maybe it’s time to put them in museums. Or better yet, turn them into farm tools.
Maybe we can also explore new technology, like smart guns. We’ve sent people to the moon—we can use our brilliant minds and skilled engineers to improve gun technology in order to save lives. Smart guns have a trigger that recognizes the fingerprint of the designated owner, and without the fingerprint verification, the gun will not shoot. This would eliminate as much as 80 percent of gun crimes, which is the number of those crimes done with lost or stolen guns.2 This feature would also prevent accidental shootings by kids and by guns that are left out irresponsibly, like my (Shane’s) friends in elementary school when one killed the other while playing cops and robbers with his dad’s gun.
One idea that has worked in other countries is keeping guns locked until they are needed for hunting or sport. Guns could be used on a monitored system, similar to an alarm system for your home. Or they could be held in a regulated storage facility and signed out as needed. This might also make the home a safer place, since so many
deaths happen by firearm suicide and accident. It could be instrumental in curbing the massive rates of suicide by gun, since we saw that studies show many suicides by gun are impulsive, done within a matter of minutes. When there is even a small degree of separation from the gun, it can be what saves someone from taking their life.
A good question is, What makes sense as a prerequisite for owning a gun? Should there be training, safety classes, a license, something similar to what you need to drive a car? Maybe a periodic renewal process and even consequences that come if you develop a criminal record or disability, also similar to a car?
Hopefully many of us can agree that research is a good thing. Whether it is for cancer or opioids or guns, research helps us understand what we are up against and what has been effective in saving lives over time. The restrictions placed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have prohibited it from studying gun violence and need to be removed and the funding restored. It is absurd that we do not have recent data because the gun lobby has forced the data to be destroyed, since what it shows could be bad for the firearms industry. Imagine if automobile makers halted all research on car safety. We’d be outraged. And very unsafe.
We need to do better. We’ve been better at protecting guns than people, and it is time to change that. We are certainly not suggesting that people should not have the right to own a gun for hunting or sport or even for protection. We are suggesting that the rights of a mass murderer, a violent boyfriend, a disgruntled employee, a violent extremist, or a serial killer should not infringe on the rights of everyone else. We will never get rid of all violence. It goes all the way back to Cain and Abel. But we can join much of the industrialized world in making sure that gun violence is rare and we can work hard to make it rarer and rarer—as opposed to it being a normal, everyday reality that claims the lives of over one hundred of God’s children each day in our country.
Beating Guns Page 21
