Sandy Hook/gun control essay recap...

NOTE:  Here is a recap of what I've done on this essay to date; thank you for your collective ideas, corrections and insights.  Another four more parts and I think I'm done.

Introduction

For most of my sixty years I have consciously and intentionally wrestled with what it means to be a patriotic person of peace within our American culture of violence.  As a straight, middle class, white man I know I have benefited from – and been entertained by – my culture’s various violent obsessions.  I have been overtly and covertly wounded and corrupted by them, too.  At times I have protested and railed against some of our more vicious habits, spent time in therapy as a consequence of family rage and experienced in my core the blinding fury that so easily erupts into acts of deadly destruction.  As a husband, father and pastor I have also wept while keeping silent vigil with those who have survived acts of murder and suicide.

“Life is hard – and agony accompanies joy.” That’s how I have sometimes made sense of the sorrow born of our uniquely violent culture.  “Now we see as through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul wrote, “later we shall see face to face… for all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God.”  This is the theological gap between comprehension and mystery I generally accept as another way of enduring the heart ache – always, however, with the caveat that, “when we do get to see face to face, God damn it, I want some answers because this pain is almost unforgivable.”  As a servant of the Crucified but Risen Christ, I trust that God’s presence is with us all in the agony of real life.  And I believe by faith that this present darkness will one day be redeemed, too.

But after the massacre of twenty first grade and kindergarten children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – as well eight other adults including the shooter – it is clear to me that my grasp of what it means to wait upon the Lord is too passive.  Now is the time for decisive action to limit and prohibit the spread of assault weapons in America.  Military-grade hardware and access to massive amounts of ammunition is neither necessary to protect the Second Amendment nor to advance the joy of hunting and sport shooting.  Indeed, I would argue that this is the hour to challenge the NRA and all who would blather on with vague abstractions about liberty while turning a profit by innocent death.  “For what shall it profit a man” asks my spiritual tradition, “if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

To my mind, there are four inter-related components that deserve our careful consideration as well as compassionate conversation if we are going to modestly challenge the cult of American violence.  The easiest – and most immediately pressing – involves new legislation that would inhibit and restrict the ability to own assault weapons while closing the loopholes concerning background checks and gun registration.  This should become a public health issue fought with as much vigor as was brought against the tobacco industry and their lobbyists.  The other three aspects of this challenge – delegitimizing the NRA and its influence in politics, honoring and understanding the role guns play in the male rites of passage in rural America and elevating the use of nonviolent conflict resolution strategies – is a more demanding and long-term quest.

To do anything less suggests at the very least an addiction to the insanity of the status quo – noting that the classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – and perhaps moral cowardice and political complicity.  Back in the day the old union organizing song asked, “Which side are you on?”  For me, the haunting presence of the slain children and their surviving families in Sandy Hook have reissued this question for our culture – and the jury is still out how we will classify ourselves:  so let me share my observations concerning each of the four challenges that give shape and form to which side we are on.

Personal Context

At the outset, let me confess that I am not an unbiased observer.  Once upon a time I attended Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT – for two years as a small child – as did my younger sister and brother.  I received my first Bible at the Newtown church and sang in my first church choir, too.  Nearly fifty years later, while I was exploring a new call to ministry that eventually led me to Pittsfield, I interviewed for the position of pastor at the Congregation Church in Newtown – and took a quick side trip to visit our old neighborhood – before the interview.  Let’s just say that I have great affection and respect for the people of this small community.  Unquestionably, proximity has played a powerful role in my strong reaction to this massacre.  But sharing some of the ties that bind with families in Newtown is not the only reason for my change of heart. 

After all, I knew Gabby Giffords from my ten years of ministry in Tucson, AZ.  From time to time, we shopped at the same Safeway where she and eighteen other innocent people were shot.  And while the horror of her attempted murder left me stunned and shocked – as did the carnage and death from the Aurora, CO movie theatre shooting where 12 people died and 58 were wounded – like so many other Americans I had sadly come to accept such violence as part of our inevitable status quo.   It was tragic, emotionally incomprehensible and evil, to be sure, but also just a part of another day in America where on average 18 people die every 24 hours by gun violence.   Intellectually this culture of violence was repugnant to me, but my revulsion remained theoretical because other demands captured my attention and imagination.  Like C.S. Lewis before the death of his beloved wife, Joy, the reality of American violence was a vile abstraction for me.

My heart was broken and my conscience enflamed, however, when twenty innocent, small children were slaughtered as they waited for their classless to begin one Friday morning in Newtown.  Those babies looked like my daughters thirty years ago – or the children who gather around me each Sunday morning in the chancel of our church in another American small town in America – and I found myself weeping uncontrollably in the aftermath of the attack.  In many ways it felt like

September 11^th 2001 all over again.   And I am not ashamed to say that I still find myself weeping whenever I take the time to fully consider that cold blooded, mass murder has become an acceptable reality for America.  Since the domestic terrorist attack of December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been 643 gun related deaths throughout the United States – and truth be told, this is a conservative estimate.

Small wonder that on the second anniversary of the attempted murder of Representative Gabby Giffords not only has former General Stanley McChrystal condemned the epidemic of gun violence in America – and urged strict control on assault weapons designed only for combat – but Ms. Giffords herself has launched Americans for Responsible Solutions.  “In response to a horrific series of shootings that have sown terror in our communities, victimized tens of thousands of Americans and left one of its own bleeding and near death in a Tucson parking lot, Congress has done something quite extraordinary - nothing at all,” ,” wrote Gifford and her husband, Mark Kelly in USA Today.

As a part of a growing movement of compassion and common sense, “the couple hopes to work with politicians to take gun lobbyists head-on and engage the country in a discussion about preventing gun violence. They also hope to establish a requirement for a comprehensive background check for the private sale of guns and address the issue of the treatment of mentally ill people in the United States.” Said Kelly, a veteran of Desert Storm, “the only reason for a weapon to have an extended magazine is to kill people… lots of people.” (ABC News)

Political Context

And so begins what I see as a three pronged fight for rational gun control in the United States:  a) responsible gun owners will begin to speak out against the current madness; b) politicians searching for middle ground will seek consensus; and c) people of faith and compassion must push the envelope beyond what is expedient so that this kairos moment is not wasted.  Former President Bill Clinton cut to the chase when he said on January 9, 2013:  “I grew up in the hunting culture, but this is nuts. Why does anybody need a 30 round clip for a gun? Why does anybody need one of those things that carries 100 bullets? The guy in Colorado had one of those.”

Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005 - half, in all of the history of the country. So, I hope that former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and other people who stepped up after the Newtown tragedy will have some impact on this.  And there are going to need to be some armed guards in some schools where there is a higher crime rate and kids themselves may take weapons to school, absolutely. But it is not an excuse not to deal with this issue. (AboveTopSecret.com, January 10, 2013)

Former commander of the US war in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, framed the conversation like this:  “I spent a career carrying typically either an M16 or an M4 Carbine.  An M4 Carbine fires a .223 caliber round which is 5.56 mm at about 3000 feet per second. When it hits a human body, the effects are devastating. It’s designed for that.  That’s what our soldiers ought to carry. I personally don’t think there’s any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets and particularly around the schools in America.”

We’ve got to take a serious look—I understand everyone’s desire to have whatever they want—but we’ve got to protect our children, we’ve got to protect our police, we’ve got to protect our population. Serious action is necessary. Sometimes we talk about very limited actions on the edges and I just don’t think that’s enough. The number of people in America killed by firearms is extraordinary compared to other nations, and I don’t think we’re a bloodthirsty country. We need to look at everything we can do to safeguard our people. (Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2013)

And New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, no darling of any particular political ideology save pragmatism, put it like this:   “It’s time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do — not go to Congress and say, ‘What do you guys want to do?’ This should be his number one agenda. He’s president of the United States. And if he does nothing during his second term, something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns.”  Even the socially conservative pollster, Frank Lutz, has discovered that “87% of non-NRA gun owners and 74% of NRA gun owners support requiring a criminal background check of anyone purchasing a gun.   Further 80% of non-NRA gun owners and 71% of NRA gun owners support prohibiting people on the terrorist watch list from purchasing guns.” (Brady Campaign)

Adam Gopnik expressed the essence of American utilitarianism when it comes to common sense gun control when he wrote a Jonathan Swift-like article for The New Yorker on December 20, 2012.  “We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids.”

Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan!  Most of us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could.  

We do live in such a city. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control.

 We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife.

And while it is too early to claim with any certainty that this emerging consensus among people of good will can be turned into significant legislative change, more and more Americans are beginning to break free from the propaganda of fear promoted as sacred truth by the NRA and its allies.  The words of top Republican strategist and pollster, Frank Lutz are illustrative again when he spoke on the CBS program “This Morning.”  “The public wants guns out of the schools, not in the schools, and they're not asking for a security official or someone else."  

I don’t think the NRA is listening. I don’t think that they understand. Most Americans would protect the Second Amendment rights and yet agree with the idea that not every human being should own a gun, not every gun should be available at anytime, anywhere, for anyone. That at gun shows, you should not be able to buy something there and then without any kind of check whatsoever. What they're looking for is a common-sense approach that says that those who are law-abiding should continue to have the right to own a weapon, but that you don’t believe the right should be extended to everyone at every time for every type of weapon. (Common Gunsense, December 28, 2012)

Perhaps, for the first time since the passage of the Brady Act, we are ready to consider the facts.

·        Fact:  Empirical evidence shows that creating even the smallest impediment to crime – any crime from rape and assault to petty theft and gun violence – significantly reduces a criminal’s incentive – and thus makes all crime rarer.   What the New York City police have discovered – despite all theorizing to the contrary – is that crime is “opportunistic.”  When you “build a low annoying walls against criminals… crimes decrease.”  Hard and objective experience dismantles the status-quo arguments that posit “social pressures, slum pathologies, the profits to be made in drug dealing and the ever ascending levels of despair” will always necessitate more guns to defeat an ever more deadly cult of ruthless, social predators.  The facts, however, show that simply making it a little harder to acquire guns will profoundly reduce gun violence because criminals are lazy.  (New Yorker, December 20, 2012)

·        Fact:  More guns never create greater safety.  In the Tucson shooting of Representative Giffords, in addition to the weapons of the assailant a number of by-standers were also armed.  Given the chaos, however, they chose not to open fire because no one knew where to direct their deadly fire.  What’s more, states with stricter gun laws have fewer gun murders, fewer suicides and fewer accidental deaths by gun use according to studies conducted by social scientist, David Hemenway of Harvard University. (NY Times, December 12, 2012)

·        Fact:  The United States experienced 12, 664 murders in 2011 – 8, 583 involved fire arms.  In the UK, with both a different culture towards guns and greater regulation, the murder rate is 550.  In the USA there are 89 guns for every 100 citizens; in the UK it is 6 per 100.  (Guardian, January 10, 2013)

Gun control does matter.  Deterrents do make a difference.  And the former conventional wisdom that stipulates that “Guns don’t kill people: people kill people” is being questioned.  In this changing social context, the political mojo of the moment has taken three broad forms.  Senator Diane Feinstein of California has proposed the most aggressive and comprehensive legislative changes making the sale, possession and transportation of 100 types of assault weapons illegal.  Her focus would also require a thorough background check for all weapons and ammunition while grand-fathering over 900 weapons clearly identified with hunting and sporting.  The on-line Courage Campaign is one aspect of their coordinated effort to keep public support behind this initiative. 

A second political initiative has emerged since the Newtown massacre spearheaded by Gabby Giffords and her husband Frank Kelly, the retired astronaut.  The goal of their super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, is to offset the political clout of the NRA – which annually spends $24 million on lobbying and political activity – by raising $20 million for the 2014 elections.  Kelly framed their new work like this:   “I’ve taken a gun to work. I flew in combat in Operation Desert Storm off the USS Midway, carrying a 9-millimeter.

I certainly understand the importance and the right to own a firearm in our country. I certainly get that. Gabby and I want to protect people’s Second Amendment rights. But I personally believe, and so does Gabby, that assault weapons used to kill a lot of people all at once should only be used by the military…  Achieving reform to reduce gun violence and prevent mass shootings will mean matching gun lobbyists in their reach and resources.  (Washington Post, January 9, 2013)

And the third political force exploring recommendations for new gun control legislations is the Federal Task Force being coordinated by Vice-President Joe Biden at the directive of President Obama.   The work of this panel that includes input from Wal-Mart, the film industry and various gun lobbyists including the NRA will be shared with the public by on January 15, 2013.  The intensity of public outrage is palpable – and clearly drives political consideration for the first time in decades. 

But while all of the aforementioned politicians are committed to the public good – and risk the wrath of NRA demagogues in the months to come – it will take more than their current explorations to create change.

Already the Obama administration, understanding the political lay of the land awaiting them in Congress, is moving towards a lowest common denominator solution.  While they genuinely oppose the proliferation of assault weapons, it appears likely that they will emphasize closing the loopholes on background checks, reducing access to high velocity magazines and other modest reforms designed to secure common ground.  This modest step forward warrants our political and moral support.  After all, politics is the art of the possible and real progress must not be compromised in stubborn pursuit of the perfect.  Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, observed that “There is a natural gravity that happens toward the ban (of assault weapons) in the wake of tragedies… But it’s very important to point out that background checks could have an even bigger impact.” (NY Times, January 11, 2013)

Other modest proposals include those suggested by Nicholas Kristof:  limit gun purchases to one per month, make serial numbers harder to erase, put microchips in new weapons so that they can be traced effectively and make it illegal to sell weapons privately without a background check.  (NY Times, December 12, 2012)  There is wisdom in such modesty – and I believe people of good will can rally behind whatever is possible – and celebrate these changes with vigor. 

At the same time, however, faith communities must keep our eyes on a more profound prize – the beloved community – a way of living and interacting that is not constrained to political expediency.

Poetic/Prophetic Context

To acknowledge the limitations of politics is not to denigrate the important work that takes place in this realm.  Compromise, careful listening and seeking common ground in a respectful way is an essential component of caring for the common good.  It is also woefully incomplete for without a vision greater than ourselves, the people perish.  Political realism can make a contribution to the beloved community, but politicians will never be in the vanguard of social transformation for this requires visionaries, poets, prophets and artists.

 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a social realist guided by the poetic vision of the Hebrew prophets, once said that:   All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be - this is the interrelated structure of reality. (Address at Oberlin College)  MLK understood and honored the limits of political engagement.  He also found ways to speak to the heart and soul of the nation that tapped into our hunger and thirst for justice and peace.

M. Craig Barnes, the new dean of Princeton Theological Seminary, has studied the arc of social transformation in the United States.  One observation concerning the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is salient:  while the Civil Rights Act of 1965 would never have passed Congress without the tireless work of President Lyndon Johnson, the consummate political realist, “it fell to someone else, a poet, to inspire the nation to accept the dream of a color-blind society.”

Without the dream, the legislation would never have passed.  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the country into that dream only by taking us into a painful discovery of the injustice that lurked in the corners of our hearts. That was the truth behind the reality.  But the white majority culture didn’t accept this dream easily. The African-American community, whom Dr. King had empowered with one biblical image of freedom after another, led the rest of us to it. They began by marching in the streets, and after the nation watched them mercilessly attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and angry mobs, they marched into our hearts.  But it took a realist and a truth-teller, a politician and a poet… because someone has to teach the people how to dream. (The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 20) 

A sacred invitation to move beyond the confines of political realism – to seek a vision for life in America that celebrates safety for our children while refusing to accept domestic terrorism as a  fact of everyday life – has been given to the pastors and poets, rabbis and imams, organizers, teachers, parents and citizens of the United States.  The Reverend James E. Atwood, a clergy person from Columbine, CO who was at ground zero in the aftermath of that attack, calls ours an era aching for a spiritual awakening:  for three generations our culture has been nourished on the barren metaphors of the market place.  We think and act from the bottom line rather than the common good.  Consequently our moral imaginations have atrophied and our sense of connection to the greater community has been manipulated into 15 second sound bytes that are offered up and pre-packaged for consumption like everything else in our body politic.

Atwood suggests an alternative in his all too timely book, America and Its Guns.  First, he would have us remember that time and again our chosen leadership chooses to keep us deluded and chasing after shadows rather than telling us the truth.  He notes that when then: President Bush addressed the community at Virginia Tech he said that the victims happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the truth is they were in the right place at the correct time.  They were doing what college students do – going to class. In reality these students were shot because of the “principalities and powers” created by America’s love affair with violence, guns and power.” (Congregations, Alban Institute, p. 29)  When politicians can be bought and sold, they will obscure the truth – and this happens from the Left and the Right and everywhere in-between whenever gun violence claims new victims.  Faith communities must learn to seek the truth and then speak it to power in humility.

Second, faith communities must return to their calling of nourishing a vision of community that reaches beyond naked self-interest.  We have been entrusted with the vocation of seeing the eagle inside the egg – of wrestling with a reality that goes deeper than the obvious – and if we don’t attend to this work creatively, then we cannot blame our people for choosing the safety of the darkness.  Sr. Joan Chittister notes that “simply living with people does not by itself create community.”

People live together in armies and prisons and college dormitories and hospitals, but they are not communities unless they live out of the same reservoir of values and the same supply of love… (We have been called to articulate) and share a common vision.  We have to want the good for one another. We have to be able to draw from the same well together… otherwise we have privatized the blessings of the Garden of Eden. (Wisdom Distilled from the Daily)

When cynics snipe at our notion of the beloved community, we must reply:  If you always do, what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got – and while the murder our children is currently what we’ve got, this can never be what we want.  When those driven by fear or greed plot, we must plan and organize.  To paraphrase Dr. King:  “When the evil burn and bomb, the good must build and bind. When evil women and men shout ugly words of hatred, good folk must commit themselves to the glories of love.”

(Because) darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction... The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars, guns begetting more guns – must be broken or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

So it will fall to the poets and organizers – the faith communities and those not bound by the constraints of politics – to advance the cause of the beloved community.  And I discern that this will include challenging the vicious paranoia created by the NRA and its allies while offering clear and compelling alternatives in a quiet, faithful and often poetically playful way.  To that end, let me share some considerations.