. . . through us to the world.

 

“God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ and, by the power of the Holy Spirit to grow as communities of grace, joy and peace so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.”

There are plenty of clichés going around regarding the gun-control controversy. For instance, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and on the other side, a parable that goes something like this: if a kid is hitting other kids on the playground with a stick, you don’t give everyone a stick to protect themselves against him, nor do you choose some “good kids” and give them really big sticks to protect the vulnerable, YOU TAKE AWAY THE BOY’S STICK.

Both carry enough logic to draw nods; they make sense. Repeating them over and over again, however, doesn’t explain the fact that the US has conflated the ownership of lethal weaponry with freedom, has made the “right to bear arms” a central political stance . . . and is experiencing an unbelievable epidemic of “people killing people” using guns.

I don’t think there’s any cliché that’s going to save the US from the dilemma it’s created for itself.

Obscured in the rhetoric is the denial of justice for the 17^th victim of the school shooting in Florida recently. Had Nicholas Cruz had a single shot, muzzle-loading gun similar to those in use when the second amendment was given birth, it’s unlikely there would have been more than one or two victims; the inclusion of machine guns as arms which everyone has the right to bear makes an undeniable difference. A difference gun-lovers refuse to acknowledge.

Ernie Regehr is a co-founder of Project Ploughshares, an organization that has focused on the arms trade for many years by now. (The RJC Class of 60 will remember him as a classmate in their sophomore year.) Ernie’s 2015 book, Disarming Conflict, studies the roots, progress and ends of wars and civil conflict, why and how political/social/economic conflicts often end up in killings with small and large weaponry. In a much earlier book, Making a Killing, he analyzed the role Canadian arms manufacturers and traders play in armed conflict—it was a startling revelation to me at the time. I’m not quite as naïve anymore; I realize that corporate arms manufacturing and trading rely on fear and conflict to thrive; there’s no better news for these industries than is the erupting into violence of some conflict. 

I suspect they can only sleep at night if they keep repeating: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

As Anabaptists, we Mennonites have a long history of living without means to defend ourselves with weapons. The Kingdom of God—however we visualize this—is not initiated through force but through love, forgiveness and treating even enemies with kindness and understanding. It’s a mindset: it’s eminently possible to see a Christ-like response to conflict as reconciliatory, and equally possible to assume that the world is unalterably adversarial. Consequently, "I need a gun wherever I am," or, "I won’t have a gun, sword, switchblade on my person or premises . . . ever."

Thing is, the mindset changes when you put a gun into someone’s reach. We all long to survive, to live, to be safe. Arm any one of us and a possibility opens up that is extremely tempting, and to which America seems to have fallen prey. 

Maybe guns don’t kill people, but clearly many, many people die because guns exist. When guns are there to bolster the darker sides of our consciousness, people die. That’s true of wars both civil and internecine, as it is of personal and social conflict. Rage can be made to subside given time and love; a handy gun inevitably short-circuits the reconciliation possibility.

Let’s at least seek justice for the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth victims of the madman with a gun. It would be a start.

And to those who claim to follow Christ but have bought into the gun/freedom rhetoric, please read the gospel again. 

Please.

Children's lives are at stake.