“Long Overdue Reform of Gun Control”

“Long Overdue Reform of Gun Control”       October 8, 2017

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*Prayer of Confession                                                Dr. Roger L. Ray

We stand today on blood soaked land we have inherited

From a centuries long heritage of violence

Which was born in the genocide of the indigenous

And whose industry was built by the forced labor of slaves. Our forbearers took the northern half of Mexico 

At the end of a bayonet and rifle

            And we have often indulged ourselves with 

            The trite phrase that America was built with

            God, guns, and guts when we have always known

            It was mostly guns.

The violence that today continues this unbroken chain 

            No longer has even the apologetic of

            Taking land or forcing labor. 

            Now it is just violence that is random, senseless, 

and incomprehensible.

We will not ask forgiveness again 

since this is a sin that is within our power to stop.

We ask only for the courage to try again,

To work harder,

To be more successful

In changing who we have been into 

The nation we long to be.  Amen.

Wisdom Lesson                                                                

Adam Gopnik wrote after the Sandy Hook shooting for The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-simple-truth-about-gun-control)

There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life: deficits and debts and climate change. Gun violence, and the work of eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not one of them. Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President … 

Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics eliminate bacterial infections … Those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as the faith healers would rather watch the children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know what would have saved [all those lives].

Our city government has recently made the decision to make it illegal to keep a Pit Bull as a pet. Many dog enthusiasts are outraged by this decision and they are insisting that it is not the fault of the breed that there are so many Pit Bull attacks. They insist that it is bad dog owners who have given this breed a bad name.

In a recent community conversation, I made the observation that of all of the deaths from dog attacks that happen every year in America, more than half of time, a Pit Bull is the dog that killed them. That fact almost never has the slightest impact on the owners of Pit Bulls who insist that their dog is loving and sweet and would never hurt anyone.

Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual giants from the early days of our nation said:  To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. The hard facts are in. Looked at purely from a mathematical perspective, Pit Bulls are the most dangerous dogs on the planet.

But if you happen to love your own Pit Bull, that fact is often rendered meaningless. Not because the fact is mistaken but because the owner of a Pit Bull simply does not want for that fact to be true.

To really understand a Pit Bull owner, you have to also ask what owning a Pit Bull does for the dog owner. How does having an efficient killing machine in the house make them feel? And, in fact, in most cases, it makes a person who is afraid of crime or violence, or rape, feel more secure. Their dog is not at all likely to attack a member of the family that feeds and houses it. The neighbor’s kids and visitors to the home, however, are not so safe.

Still, in the overall scheme of things, and I can’t believe that I am saying it just this way, but Pit Bulls only kill about 25 people every year. In a country of 300 million people, statistically, 25 is not many. The fact that most of them are children changes the dynamic a bit, but still, Pit Bulls only kill about twice as many people as dairy cows and no one is suggesting that we outlaw dairy cows.

Controversial topics are controversial because there are two or more plausible views at play but when emotions get involved, reason is often the first casualty. But we are not here to talk about Pit Bulls. Today, we’re talking about guns . . . which generates more irrational and heated controversy than almost any other topic in America.

It has not been uncommon, through the years, for Sean and me to make a decision to completely redo a service in light of a national tragedy. But, in spite of the fact that we are gathered in the wake of our worst modern mass murder, that is not why I am talking about gun control today. Today’s agenda was set weeks ago, long before the Las Vegas shooting and, not to be flippant about it at all, but mass shootings is not the real issue for me. These incidents get into the news because they are so random and so tragic but I want to have a very sober and factual conversation with you today about gun control and I want to start with the observation that mass murder accounts for only a tiny fraction of the casualties from gun violence in our country every year.

We have over 30,000 gun deaths in America annually. About 60% of those are suicides, several thousand are the result of domestic violence, several more thousand are murders, many are accidents and a few are a result of police action. Almost none, about 250 per year, are the result of self-defense, which is the reason most people give for buying guns in the first place. Don’t let these statistics slip by you: for every person shot in an act of self-defense, 60 die in a suicide, 35 are murdered, and several die by accident. Less than 1% of gun deaths occur when the gun is being used for its stated purpose.

Mass murders get into the news. Mass murders get people interested in the topic and, for a little while, the enraged public calls for action. But we know the steps to this public dance. We all lived through Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Dallas, and Orlando, and we have a fairly clear idea how the news cycle will go after Las Vegas.

At first the NRA will be silent. Some politicians will insist that we not talk about it right now . . . we need to show respect to the grieving and not try to turn a horrible incident into a political opportunity. Someone will sincerely offer suggestions like having a moment of silence, or donating blood, and a few will even try to nibble at the heels of the gun industry, suggesting that we outlaw the firearms equivalent of Pit Bulls.

Most people really are good. Most people want to be helpful. And so there was an immediate response in Las Vegas of hundreds of volunteers coming forward to donate blood. The blood center had to announce that they had more than they needed and no one needed to donate anymore. Whole blood has a shelf life and they had more than they could possibly use.

Ironically, it was Congressman Steve Scalise who stepped up and asked for volunteers to donate blood. Scalise had only just returned to the Congress after having barely survived an assassination attempt in June in which he was shot while playing baseball. He is really lucky to be alive and is even still taking physical therapy to learn how to walk again. As a victim of gun violence, he still provided cover for the gun lobby by offering this suggestion that people donate blood when he had to have known that the hospitals in Las Vegas were crying “no mass!” 

That is the strength of the gun lobby in Washington. Even if you have been shot, you still will tell public lies to cover for them because without the NRA’s “A” rating for members of Congress and their political donations, most of them could not keep their jobs. Sadly, after telling the public that they didn’t need more blood donors, when Scalise and others were still calling for blood donations, the hospitals backtracked and are playing along . . . but it is a ruse that is only intended to trick the gullible.

Donating blood is usually a good thing to do. I donate every time my waiting period is up and you should too but not to give people the false sense that they have done something meaningful so that they can forget about changing gun laws.

It is like telling someone that they are in your thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers have not worked. It is time for something more serious.

There are 4 common lines of defense intended to shut down any meaningful response to gun violence. Someone will say:

1)   Gun ownership is a right guaranteed by the constitution.

2)   Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. A corollary of this one claims that we do not have a gun problem, we have a mental health problem.

3)   The only way to stop a bad person with a gun is for a good person to have a gun.

4)   Gun laws don’t work, if they did, Chicago and Washington, D.C. would not have such a high murder rate.

With your permission, I would like to address each of these in the cold, clear light of reason. I will try to be brief – and I will fail in my attempt at being brief.

The second amendment, which appears in our Bill of Rights, guarantees to our citizens the right to bear arms because that is crucial to maintain a citizen army . . . a well regulated militia. The second amendment was not interpreted to mean that every citizen has a right to own guns for the first 200 years of our nation’s history. The famous Supreme Court decision in the Heller case literally changed a “well regulated militia” into an individual’s right to own a gun. It was an example of an extreme judicial over-reach but it is now the law of the land. But the Heller decision did not grant citizens the right to own a tank, or a bazooka. The government retains the right to regulate and restrict, within reason, who can own particular kinds of guns.

That line has constantly been moving through the years.  The NRA shifted in the 1960’s from being a hunting and sports organization into a gun rights organization after Martin Luther King, Jr. and John and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Johnson administration started to press for gun control and gun owners panicked in fear that the government would take all of their guns. At that point the NRA started their irrational fear campaign saying that if they ever give an inch the government might take a mile.

In the most recent mass murder, the domestic terrorist used what is called a “bump stock” to convert a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle. Clearly, if automatic rifles are not legal to own, the ability to buy an inexpensive upgrade that turns your semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle shouldn’t be legal but these are the high weeds where the argument always goes. For the NRA, saying “no” to anything is just the camel’s nose under the tent and so they will defend the most indefensible hardware, always leading a paranoid charge against the day when Johnson, or Carter, or Clinton, or Obama will come for your guns.

If they chose to do so, Congress could make a rational case to limit gun ownership to weapons appropriate to home defense or hunting. The NRA won’t like it but the 2^nd Amendment does not guarantee anyone a military style weapon, or armor piercing ammunition, or high capacity ammunition drums or clips.

The second argument I mentioned, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Yes, a gun, on its own, is unlikely to kill anyone but we have not approached the problem with North Korea telling ourselves that nuclear bombs don’t kill people, people kill people. We have a reasonable fear that a rogue state with nuclear weapons would be more likely to kill people.

People are killed with baseball bats and knives but you don’t kill sixty people from a 32^nd story hotel window with knives or baseball bats.  And, yes, people can commit suicide in very many ways, from taking pills, to cutting their wrists, hanging, or just falling asleep in their running car in a garage. You can easily kill yourself by just pouring bleach and ammonia into a bowl and breathing the fumes.

But I can tell you this: in my nearly 40 years of ministry, I have lost five parishioners to suicide and all five of them used a gun. Many others have made either suicidal gestures or attempts but they all had a chance to get medical help and counseling and they all survived. Self-inflicted gunshots rarely allow a person to either change their mind or be found in time to be saved.

If you are so callous that you don’t care that 16,000 people kill themselves every year with a gun then please let me tell you about the five people I personally knew who died by their own hand or let me introduce you to families who have lost someone to suicide because you really need an education on this topic. Suicide is preventable but it is very hard to prevent when there is a gun in the house.

I mentioned that the corollary to this one is the claim that we don’t have a gun problem, we have a mental health problem. I have a couple of things that I need to say about that.  On the one hand there is a certain truth to this. There are about 400 million guns in the United States which is about half of all of the guns in the world. Only a third of Americans own guns and so, do the math, some of those people own a whole lot of guns. We have more than twice as many guns per capita than any other nation in the world but there are countries where there are a lot of guns but there are not many gun deaths.  Hunting is very much a part of the culture of Canada and Denmark, but they have a very low incidence of gun related deaths.

You can reasonably say that there is something wrong with Americans. Canadians have about a third as many guns, per capita, as we do in the United States but we have about 200 times as many gun related deaths. They have mental illness in Canada, just like we do in the USA, just without all of the mass murder and domestic killing.

So, yes, something is wrong with us but as in the most recent event in Las Vegas, there was no way to tell that this white guy with a lot of guns was any more likely to shoot 500 people than any of the white guys I know here in the Ozarks who own as many guns as he did. There is no way to know which person is going to express their depression, cope with their bankruptcy, divorce, or miserable home life, by shooting up a theater, a nightclub, a school, or a concert. The only part of this we can even begin to control is the access to weapons and ammunition.

As our friend, Dr. Paul Thomlinson, has mentioned very recently from this pulpit, the mentally ill are much more likely to be the victims of violence than they are to be the perpetrators of violence. Blaming mental illness is just another deception used to shut down conversation about gun control.

In fact, in the absolute height of hypocrisy, Speaker Paul Ryan trotted out this old saw about mental illness in less than 48 hours after the Las Vegas shooting but earlier this year he martialed legislation through the house to remove restrictions against the mentally ill being able to buy guns.

Trump signed this into law in February, one of the only pieces of legislation actually passed by his administration. They then went to work trying to make it legal to buy silencers. Tump’s own son made TV commercials supporting the legislation to allow people like the murderer in Las Vegas to put silencers on their weapons of mass destruction.  And yet, Paul Ryan comes out in front of the TV cameras blaming this incident on an undiagnosed mental illness.

I want this conversation to be rational and factual but there is no way around calling out Paul Ryan for this massive attempt at deception. If you believe there is a shortage of treatment for mental illness in this country then I agree. Put more money into mental health, but don’t put more guns in the hands of people with serious and persistent mental illness. That would be, and forgive me for saying it this way, “crazy.”

The third argument we will hear raised this week is that the answer to gun violence is more guns. Good guys should be armed to stop bad guys who are armed. It is sort of like saying in an A.A. meeting that the solution to alcoholism is to drink more . . . but I digress.

The majority of gun deaths are suicides and the chances of death from a suicide attempt are much smaller if there is no gun present. Another of the top categories of death is domestic violence.

As tragic as the death toll in Las Vegas was, there were that many women shot and killed by their husbands or boyfriends last month, in September. That many were killed in August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January. That’s right, more than 50 women are shot and killed by their husband or boyfriend every month. There is a lot of domestic violence in our country but if there is a gun in the home, the woman is five times as likely to be killed. A woman who buys a gun to protect herself is much more likely to be killed with that gun than she is likely to successfully use it to defend herself. Some estimates are as high as 17 times more likely to be killed if a woman pulls a gun on an assailant.

We are talking about math here. One of the things to love about math is, numbers don’t care what your opinion is or what you want to believe. Math is math. And the math is that 50 more women will be killed in November and 50 more in December unless we find the will to do something to change the trend.

Finally, the 4^th argument claims that gun control laws don’t work . . . just look at Chicago and Washington, D.C. That is true enough. The gun laws in Chicago and Washington have done little to solve the gun violence in those cities but, folks, in Missouri, it is illegal to sell alcohol within 100 feet of a church or a school but that has not kept church members or college students from drinking.

A city’s gun laws hardly matter to anyone who has a car or who is capable of taking a train or a bus out of town. Gun laws do work in Canada, the UK, Denmark, Japan, Germany, New Zealand . . . In Australia, following a mass murder at Port Arthur on April 28, 1996, in just 12 days, legislators passed sweeping gun control laws and the government instituted a massive buy back program that netted over a million guns. Australia had previously suffered a mass killing at a rate of about one a year. Since Port Arthur, there have been none . . . 21 years and counting.

People in Australia didn’t like it. They had a gun culture much like ours. Many of the legislators who enacted these strict gun laws were not re-elected. They all knew that they were falling on their political swords, but they did what was right to protect the lives of Australians. Can you, in your wildest dreams, imagine Paul Ryan, or Mitch McConnell, or Donald Trump, doing what is right because it is right even if it cost them their next election? There is something wrong with Americans . . . primarily, we need to be more like Australians.

Usually, when there has been a mass murder, I go to the Bass Pro Shop gun counter and hang around for a while, watching to see who all comes to buy guns in the predictable rush after a mass murder. I didn’t go this time because I was just too sick about Las Vegas but I know from news reports that the manufacturer has run out of bump-stocks, even after increasing the price by ten times.  There has been a predictable rise in gun manufacturer’s stock, and a massive increase in sales of hardware and ammunition.

A part of that is the fear of the changes in gun laws that never seem to materialize but that is not all of it.

When I began, I posed the question, how does owning a Pit Bull make the owner feel? The same question has to be asked about gun owners. When they go to the store and buy a semi-automatic rifle, armor piercing ammunition, and a bump stock…. How do they feel?

When people at gun ranges have been interviewed after shooting an altered weapon that fires dozens rounds in mere seconds . . . they often report feeling elation. It was exciting, rewarding, it made them feel powerful. Is that because they made dozens of holes in a paper target? Or was it because they fanaticized about how many people they could kill with that weapon?

How does it feel to own several military styled weapons? Do you think any of these repressed, fearful, gun collectors watched the same news that we watched . . . 500 injured, 59 dead, and thought to themselves, “I could do better than that.”

That’s part of the problem with announcing that this was the largest, the worst, the most deadly . . . because, for a certain portion of the NRA crowd, that is a challenge. This shooter didn’t take all of his guns and ammo to that hotel room. He even had a stockpile of explosives and a fairly elaborate escape plan. He meant to do more. This was supposed to be his first attack.

Part of the problem with giving these monsters a name and news coverage is that every part of their plan becomes a lesson plan. Their death becomes an object lesson for future murderers.   

Folks, as with so many other of the modern challenges we have looked at these past few months, there is a simple, evident, and obvious solution to carnage we see every year in America. Every other developed nation in the world has already done what we have refused to do.

It is not the 59 people who died last week in Las Vegas or the fifty women who will die next month in their own homes . . . it is the very predictable 32,000 people who will needlessly die next year if we cannot muster the political will to do what is right, and obvious, and necessary. No more thoughts and prayers. No more asking for forgiveness or holding memorials or blood drives. This is a problem that can be solved and there is nothing but moral shame in store for us if we don’t get it done.