For over 30 years, I have been frustrated by the inevitable destruction our gun culture imposes on American life. As a state senator in Utah in the 1990s, I promoted carefully modest gun safety bills. As an ordinary contributor to Brady, Giffords, Everytown, and other gun responsibility organizations, or just as another person expressing my opinion, lost in the vastness of our media universe, the disorder of gun violence calls out for my attention as a citizen. As it is for everyone, this call is more immediate for me after a mass shooting of children, but it is always there. It is my conscience, I suppose.
The starting point for me is the falsehood, the false pretense of our gun culture. The right to carry a gun, and the claim to a right to exert that power, must not be the highest right in our land — one which comes ahead of the rest. This bothers me, that I have to confront this falsehood. I really don’t like us avoiding the truth and giving obeisance to the falsehood. We have to keep a few things, which we know to be true, in front of us and give them their due. Here are some.
First, guns are machines designed to kill. Most of the weapons sold today are not designed for hunting or target practice; they are built to kill people. There may perhaps be a proper place for these weapons, in armies or in police forces, but certainly not among the general public. For the general public inevitably includes people who are invisibly unstable and easy prey to acts of hatred or anger.
Second, our gun culture exalts guns over life. We refuse to control guns even though they are the essential instruments in the murders of children and grown-ups time and again. If we say we obey God’s will, and we believe that God wants children to live a full life, and yet we distribute everywhere the ready means to kill children, then this is idolatry. In fact we do not worship God; we worship the gun.
Third, the Second Amendment has proven to be a great obstacle to placing God’s will first, ahead of guns. It is possible to imagine unreasonable restrictions on guns, but the Second Amendment is used to thwart commonsense restrictions intended to keep more people alive.
Fourth, our gun culture should not be so proud of the Second Amendment anyway. The Second Amendment was designed to preserve the institution of slavery. The Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, was necessary to secure the ratification of the Constitution. The Southern states felt they needed the right to have militias to suppress slave uprisings. They did not trust the national government to protect slavery for them. Thus the Second Amendment is inextricably linked to the original sin of our nation’s founding, and to me that diminishes its place of honor as a part of the Bill of Rights. We should not be afraid to say so.
Fifth, political forces use the falsehood of the gun culture to stay in power. They are aided by gun manufacturers, lobbyists, and the culture warriors who abide in the gun mythos. These are formidable forces.
Sixth, Christian Nationalism, with its strong support for the Second Amendment, originates in white supremacy. Its supporters’ identification of Christianity with the use of guns defames the name of Christ. Just as the exaltation of guns is idolatry, so identifying gun rights with Christianity is taking the Lord’s name in vain.
Finally, we are desperate enough now to recognize that we cannot overcome this power on our own. I think that we must more often say out loud that our undue protection of gun rights is itself modern idolatry; that it is disordered and wrong. I think our faith leaders can raise awareness that exalting gun rights is wrong and needs correction. We need help from above.
I think we keep trying to require background checks, limit high capacity automatic weapons, require training, ban bump stocks, and so on, because we are drawn to truth and we want to honor it and challenge falsehood. This is stark. It is clear. It is to reject the gun culture with its roots in white supremacy and its opposition to the values of both testaments. So, occasionally discouraged as we may be, we need to keep trying. The alternative is to let the great falsehood triumph.