I grew up with guns — God and guns — in the evangelical Bible belt of East Tennessee. I have fond memories of hunting with my grandfather, and my dad was a veteran in Vietnam. Like many Christians in America, for much of my life I didn’t see any contradiction between loving Jesus and loving guns. But in the late ‘90s I moved to Philadelphia, where I studied sociology and theology. I also fell in love with the north side of Philadelphia, where we’ve been building a community, The Simple Way, for the past 25 years… and also where we’ve seen far too many lives taken by guns.
There’s an old saying, “Where we sit determines what we see.” Over the past couple of decades we’ve seen so many lives lost to guns. One of them was Papito. I can remember hearing the pop of the gunshots, closer than usual, and came outside to find this young man collapsed in front of my house. He was still alive, fighting for every breath. I sat with him, prayed with him, as the ambulance came. We found out the next morning that Papito didn’t make it. He was 19 years old. For me, that was the moment I said “Enough.”
After Papito died, we held protests and vigils outside of some of the most notorious gun shops in Philadelphia, like the “Shooter Shop” around the corner from my house. One of those protests was on Good Friday, when Christians around the globe remember the brutal death of Jesus on the cross. I will never forget that service. After the traditional reading of the Gospel, ending with the women weeping at the foot of the cross of the executed Jesus, we did something different. We invited the moms who had lost their kids to gun violence to share their stories — and, one after another, they did.
Something transcendent, mystical, happened that day. It was as if the tears of those women two thousand years ago met the tears of our mothers and fathers. The suffering of Christ met the suffering of Kensington, our neighborhood. After the service, a woman approached me, very passionate and shaken.
“I get it… I get it,” she said.
I looked at her curiously, “Tell me.”
She went on, “God knows what it feels like to lose your son. God knows what it feels like to be me.”
In that moment I realized it was Papito’s mother. And her statement “God knows what it feels like” is one of the most powerful theological statements I’ve ever heard… better than anything I learned in seminary (no offense, Princeton).
I begin with that story because grief and lament seem like the right place to start. It is also critical to remember that there is a God who is grieving with us, aching with us, raging with us, over the lives lost to gun violence.
The shape of the problem
Right now we are losing over 40,000 lives a year to guns in America. Around 120 lives a day. Just to put that in perspective: In the less than 50 years I have been alive, the number of lives lost to guns domestically has surpassed all the lives lost in all of America’s wars throughout history combined. During the pandemic, gun violence became the number one cause of death of children and youth in America… more than cancer or car accidents. That’s why I like to tell my evangelical friends that you cannot be “pro-life” and ignore gun violence.
When it comes to our gun violence crisis, here are just a few other things that are worth noting. A majority of Americans choose to live unarmed. In fact, two-thirds of Americans choose the right not to bear arms. Only 32 percent of Americans own firearms. But check this out… almost half of the guns — 150 million — are owned by three percent of our population. What that means is there are a few people who own a ton of guns, an average of about 20 guns per person — and some people own thousands of guns. (In my book with Michael Martin, “Beating Guns,” we profile one man who owns over four thousand guns).
The good news is that 90 percent of Americans want to see changes when it comes to “commonsense” gun laws (more on that in a second). But here’s what’s even more interesting — a majority of gun owners themselves want to see commonsense gun laws. Depending on the specific law, up to 70 or 80 percent of gun owners want change. So why can’t we make it happen?
The short answer is that we have a small group of gun extremists who are holding us hostage. (I like to distinguish between “gun owners,” a majority of whom want to see change… and “gun extremists” who are quite unreasonable in their ideology and demands.) The gun extremists have purchased many of our politicians. In 1998, the National Rifle Association became the biggest contributor in Congressional elections, including $10 million in opposition to Barack Obama. And of course, in 2016 they endorsed Donald Trump and broke another record, donating over $30 million to help him get elected.
But even here, there is good news. If we take the NRA at their word that they have five million members… that means over 90 percent of gun owners are not a part of the NRA. And Moms Demand Action, at six million, now has more members than the NRA. Moreover, recent studies show that a majority of gun owners (62 percent) now find themselves at odds with the NRA, with gun extremism. The main problem is not gun owners but gun extremists… and gun profiteers.
One thing we can learn from the NRA is the impact of political engagement. In a recent study, nearly 50 percent of NRA members say they have contacted a public official to express their opinions on guns, and about 25 percent of them say they’ve done that this year. When the same question was asked of folks not in the NRA, only 15 percent said they had, and only five percent this year. So gun extremists are letting legislators know how they feel, how they vote, how they donate… and it makes a difference. If there is one thing we can learn from the NRA it is that engaging our legislators makes a difference. They are engaging politicians at a five-times-higher rate than those of us who are not members of the NRA. It reminds me of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Those of us who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as the war hawks.”
Gun violence is a national health crisis. But how did we get here?
Let me break it down a little more. We are addicted to violence in America. Dr. King was not exaggerating when he referred to the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” In the U.S., we have about five percent of the world’s population, but we own almost half (42 percent) of the world’s civilian-owned guns. We have nearly five times more gun dealers than McDonald’s restaurants. And we are arming the world. Right now, we manufacture about 9.5 million guns per year, that’s about 26,000 guns a day, over 1,000 guns per hour… one gun every three seconds.
We have a problem, and our gun problem is as old as America. In fact, it would be hard to imagine America without guns. How else do you build a nation on stolen land, with stolen labor?
Origins
In “Beating Guns,” Michael Martin and I trace the history of guns in detail, along with the mythology of the Wild West where, in the words of historian Pamela Haag, we “retroactively fetishized” guns in a space between what actually happened and what we wish had happened. We created a narrative of history that is not what actually was, but what we wish it was.
To be clear: Humans have been making guns, cannons, and weapons that use gunpowder since around 1000 CE. The word “gun” is first recorded as referring to a personal handheld firearm in the 1300s. So we didn’t invent the gun in America. We invented the gun market. We are the ones who mastered the art of mass consumption of guns, and began selling them domestically and around the world as a capital enterprise. One of the first mass producers of guns was none other than Eli Whitney, who signed up to make 10,000 guns (for the U.S. government) in 1798, and ironically he had never made a gun at that point. The gun capitalists were businessmen (and almost exclusively men). They didn’t love guns as much as they loved money. They simply found that they could make more money selling guns than they could selling sewing machines, or bikes, or shirts. As Henry Ford once said, “Tell me who profits from violence and I will tell you how to stop it.”
Eliphalet Remington was actually a pacifist, a poet, and a deeply religious man. Daniel Wesson had apprenticed as a shoemaker, the trade of his father. Horace Smith was a carpenter like his father. Though Christopher Spencer (inventor of the Spencer repeating rifle) sold record numbers of guns, he spoke of rejoicing when wars had ended and guns were rendered useless, when “the return to a peaceful industry of silk would be hailed with delight.” Even old Oliver Winchester, the King of Guns, is known to have had only two guns, which he may not have even fired. They were family heirlooms — a pair of engraved, ivory-gripped pistols. The man who made a fortune off guns didn’t seem to care much about guns at all. There was a sort of moral agnosticism in it all.
But here’s where things get even more interesting. The writers of the Constitution did in fact write guns into the DNA of the United States with the Second Amendment, but they were more careful than we may tend to think as they did it. They included the words “well-regulated” in it. While I have many critiques of the founding fathers of America, I am grateful for the “well-regulated” part of the Second Amendment. To make it plain, James Madison, “the Father of the Constitution,” had this to say about liberty: “Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.”
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty. One person’s unregulated right to bear arms can infringe on another person’s right to live. Keep in mind that for two hundred years the courts interpreted “the right to bear arms” as a collective or state right. Nonetheless in 2008 (in D.C. v. Heller) it became crystal clear that the right to bear arms is now to be understood as an individual right, and states cannot block it.
When it comes to race, especially for African Americans, history gets complicated.
Most of the abolition movement and civil rights movement are known for their revolutionary patience, steadfast hope, and nonviolent resistance. Yet despite the many critics of the gun in these movements, they have included some champions of its use by African Americans. Many of these came to see the gun as an equalizer. What the failed government so infected with white supremacy could not do, the gun promised to do. Where juries and courts failed black folks, the gun promised to level the playing field and help achieve what our racist, broken police and judicial systems could not achieve. While “Equal Justice Under Law” is inscribed on the front of the Supreme Court, this was only an aspiration. The gun promised power and protection where the government had failed. As one proverb went: “God made men, and Colt made them equal.”
Journalist Ida B. Wells is often called the “celebrity endorsement” for guns in the African American community. After a lynching, she bought a pistol, and remarked, “The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” Rosa Parks and, at one point, Dr. King were also gun owners, so some gun advocates claim Dr. King as one of theirs. But their argument is unraveled by King’s own comments. He later observed:
I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.
And elsewhere:
I’m not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. Our oppressors have used violence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I’m not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can’t be found in Molotov cocktails.
And of course we shouldn’t miss the obvious — Dr. King was killed with a gun. Stephen Colbert said with his characteristic brilliance, “Dr. King is pro-gun just as surely as Jesus would be pro-nails.”
Yet across communities, guns have become American icons… or to be more accurate, guns have become America’s idols. We give them a reverence and sacred value that belongs only to God.
The violence of the pandemic
Violence is everywhere. Check out these troubling facts.
- 8,000 – that’s the number of murders seen on TV by the end of elementary school
- 200,000 – that’s the number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18
- 79 percent — that’s the number of Americans who believe TV violence precipitates real-life mayhem
Violence sells — in a million different genres, including sports, video games, movies, and breaking news. Ninety percent of movies, 68 percent of video games, and 60 percent of TV shows depict some violence.
More than 25 billion hours have been logged on the video game “Call of Duty.” That’s 2.85 million years. In fact, “Call of Duty” players collectively log some 1,300 years of gameplay every day. Imagine the generative things that could be done with 1,300 years’ worth of time every day.
In the words of theologian Walter Wink: “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.”
Now there are people who say, “It’s not a gun problem, it’s a heart problem.” I like to say – it can be both. Violence is a heart problem… and a gun problem. God heals hearts, and people change laws. We need both.
This is important to note. Every country in the world has sinful people, people prone to violence, people with mental illness… but what is unique about the U.S., where we stand alone in the world, is our access to firearms, even weapons of war. And an AR-15 in the hands of a sinful person can do a whole lot of damage.
As Christians, we can believe that the church is God’s primary instrument for changing the world, while still believing that government can be used as an instrument for the common good. So let’s make it harder for people to kill. Right now, we are making it really easy.
Common sense
Think about cars. Cars are not designed to kill, but they can be deadly. So we have done all sorts of things in order to save lives. We’ve added seat belts. We require driver’s licenses, and minimum age requirements. You have to pass a driving test, and if you abuse your license you can lose it. There’s a limit to the alcohol you can consume while operating one. We have speed limits. And on and on. We also have new technology that helps save lives, like airbags. New challenges arise like texting and driving, and we adapt to try to keep people safe — hands-free technology complements laws against texting and driving. So while policies are never perfect, they can free people up or hold people down. Consider these possible policy changes that could save lives. Studies consistently show that a majority of Americans, including a majority of gun owners, want to see some of these “commonsense” changes…
- Limit the number of handguns one person can acquire to one per month. If someone is buying more than 12 handguns in a year, they may not be making the world safer.
- Require licensing, registration, and waiting periods to allow comprehensive background checks, and cooling-off periods. Remember our car example. When you purchase one, you spend some time learning safety, preparing to drive, practicing, and then you pass a test to get your license. Might this be a good idea for owning a gun?
- Close the “gun show loophole” by not making exceptions for gun show purchases. They too would have to require background checks for all buyers. Crazy idea?
- Ban semiautomatic assault weapons, armor-piercing ammunition, and high capacity cartridges. We don’t allow grenades on the streets, why should we allow these?
- Since most gun deaths are occurring at the hands of 18-20 year olds, raise the legal handgun age to 21. Why do we trust our youth with handguns before we trust them with alcohol or the ability to rent a car?
- Advocate for new technologies and new resources that would allow government and non-government agencies to trace crime guns and protect lives.
- Eliminate the Tiahrt Amendment that requires the Justice Department to destroy records of buyers.
- Repeal laws that don’t allow law enforcement to destroy confiscated weapons when owners have lost their right to bear arms.
- ADD YOURS HERE:
This list is just meant to stir our imaginations. It is not exhaustive, and isn’t meant to prescribe but to provoke us as we think about policy changes.
Christians, disarm!
One of the most disturbing things I found as I have researched gun violence is that the highest gun-owning demographic in America is Christians. Christians own guns at a higher rate than the general population. Those of us who worship the Prince of Peace on Sunday are the ones who are packing heat. While two-thirds of Americans live unarmed, almost half of Christians own guns — 42 percent. As I discovered that, I became convinced that our gun crisis is not just a political crisis. It is also a spiritual crisis. We can’t love our enemies and simultaneously prepare to kill them.
It’s tempting to try. Jesus’s disciple Peter, when faced with the existential crisis of armed soldiers coming to arrest Jesus, picks up a sword. He stands his ground. He pulls the sword on one of the men confronting Jesus, and cuts the guy’s ear off. Jesus responds by scolding Peter, telling him to put his sword away. “Pick up the sword and die by the sword.” And then Jesus picks up the ear of the wounded persecutor and puts it back on, healing the man. So the message is crystal clear.
The early Christians understood the message. Early Church Father Tertullian said, “When Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarmed every one of us.” If ever there were a case to be made for justifiable violence, Peter had it. But there is no such thing as redemptive violence, even to protect the Messiah himself. Jesus showed us another way — a way that we can interact with evil without becoming evil.
Over 10 years ago, some friends and I were inspired by the biblical prophets Micah and Isaiah, who shared a vision for “beating swords into plows and spears into pruning hooks.” So we invited people to surrender their weapons and allow us to repurpose them into garden tools. Our first donated gun was an AK-47. We turned it into a shovel and a rake. And we have been doing it ever since, hundreds and hundreds of guns. We now have a national network called RAWtools, and we get our name from flipping “WAR” around.
I’ve learned a lot from folks like Abraham Heschel and Walter Brueggeman, and one of the things they have taught me is that we often misunderstand the prophets. We sometimes think of them as fortune-tellers, trying to predict the future, but that’s not it. They were not fortune-tellers, they were truth-tellers. And they were not trying to predict the future, they were trying to change the future by waking us up in the present. They were inviting us to imagine, and to build, a different future than the one we are headed towards right now.
That passage about beating swords into plows, Isaiah 2, ends by saying, “Nation will not rise up against nation… people will study war no more.” But what strikes me when I read it is that peace does not come from the top down. It starts from the bottom up, just like water boils. Peace does not begin with the politicians and presidents, with the kings and prime ministers. They are the ones that keep starting the wars! It is the people who lead the politicians to peace. It is the people – the prophetic conscience of the State – that become so fed up with violence that they take things into their own hands. And they begin to destroy their weapons and turn the tools of death into tools of life.
May we have the courage. May the Spirit give us the prophetic imagination that these desperate times demand. Amen.
Thank you, Shane,
Your words are sane
And truth proclaim
To kill or maim
is not ‘insane’:
Sin is to blame
Let us not shame
Our Lord’s good name
With Satan’s game
The Spirit came
To passions tame
And worlds re-frame
Through hearts of pain
Let us reclaim
Love overcame
Thank you, Shane
(Words composed late at night, sometimes using ‘wordhippo’ to get a few rhyme suggestions, but wanting to respond with more than a perfunctory comment to this deeply inspiring article. Alan, in Guelph, ON, Canada)