Guns and People

by ProfDave, ©2022

(Jul. 5, 2022) — The “mass shootings” are now a daily event – outrageous “gun violence” except when it is done with a knife or a car.  Not to mention the gun battles in the streets such as we have not seen since prohibition.  Violent “non-violent” demonstrations, too.  It’s a jungle out there!  I may be a curmudgeon, but I cannot remember anything like this even twenty years ago.  We had guns and insanity since 1608, but not even a madman would think of shooting strangers, let alone a church or a primary school.  You were institutionalized until you were safe or you chose your targets selectively, women and children were exempt and sanctuaries were sanctuaries.  If you were suicidal, you shot yourself first.

Nothing is sacred now.  Note that the rage is directed against society, not individuals (with some exceptions focused on subsets – Jews, blacks).  This is a societal problem, not a hardware problem.

Life News reports a rolling Kristallnacht against pro-life organizations, churches and CPCs, more than 35 violent incidents since Mothers’ Day.  “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment, as noted in the previous Bulletin, and several recent attacks have highlighted the dynamic and complex nature of the threat environment” (National Terrorism Advisory System, DHS).  Violence has become expected as a means of getting attention.

Progressives are quick to blame guns, but cars and knives have also been used.  Taking “weapons of war” away from civilians (and police, too) would somehow solve the problem.  Such threats are great for gun sales.  People who never owned a gun are going out and buying one while they can!  Proposing gun laws gives the illusion that we are doing something about mass murder and a way to blame “them” (those who stand in the way), but the carnage only increases.  No matter what law we pass, there will still be thousands of guns on the street and in the hands of gangs and drug cartels.  Only the law-abiders will accept disarmament.  But how about the people who pull the trigger?

My friend Jim Hoover wrote a great blog on how to limit the damage of school shootings which reminds me of the 1950’s air-raid drills, kids hiding under their desks. When you have a fever, taking aspirin can help bring it down, but treating the illness is another matter.  Our nation, our civilization is sick.  We need to come out of our denial and deal with it.

Disclaimer:  I have not been much of a Second Amendment man.  I do not, nor do I wish to own a firearm of any kind.  Navy training showed that I could not hit the broad side of a barn with one anyway. 

Is the Second Amendment obsolete?  It was a no-brainer in the 18^th century.  It affirmed the right of citizens to defend themselves, their homes and their families from lawless and despotic actions in a day when modern police forces had not been invented.  It was assumed that criminal elements would usually be armed, regardless – as they are today and will be, whatever Congress does. 

Today the need for the Second Amendment is not as clear as for the First Amendment. Today we have a well-equipped modern police force to keep ourselves and our property safe from crime.  Or do we?  Ask the urban shopkeepers of Portland and Seattle in 2020.  The outcry to defund and restrict active policing, coupled with the growing boldness of mobs, not to mention the daily mass shootings, threatens the security of all of us.  Is it safe to go shopping?  To go to church or to school?  Would you feel safer knowing there would be an armed guard in those public places, or knowing there was a 9mm in your purse?  Or even an AR15 on your mantel – perish the thought!  Some would – and more will, as the paranoia increases.  Yes, it is paranoia, but is this a safe country anymore?  Would violent criminals hesitate if they thought someone present might be armed?  The ARA might have a point.

The Second Amendment also, not so subtly, affirmed the right of rebellion against a tyrant.  The minutemen on Lexington Common were “the well-ordered militia” the Second Amendment envisioned – farmers and businessmen who took their muskets down from their mantels and knew how to use them.  Without ordinary citizens carrying weapons the Revolution would have never happened.  Our country was made and kept free by bullets – civilian bullets – as well as ballots.  Meanwhile, in France, the concept of “the nation at arms,” institutionalized in the National Guard, was the power of revolutionary France and of those who sought to spread the liberal program – against the notion of professional and mercenary armies.

At the end of the 18^th century it was understood that the right to rebellion (by a well-ordered militia) was the last recourse of a free people to an unconstitutional (illegitimate) sovereign.  Is that provision obsolete today?  God forbid that it ever happens here!  But it does happen elsewhere – often.  Begging the pardon of Republicans, but what if January 6 had been a real “insurrection?” Instead of urging loud demonstrations of support, what if President Trump had ended his rally, flanked by supporting Generals, by declaring martial law and suspending the Constitution – and instead of a stick-wielding mob breaking into the Capitol, it was seized by war tanks and Marines?  It would have been the Second Amendment right and duty of the state National Guards and every loyal citizen to rise up.  This did not happen!  [Personally, I believe Trump’s ideology would never have allowed any such thing, as distraught as he obviously was.]

The National Terrorism Advisory System is warning us, “In the coming months, we expect the threat environment to become more dynamic as several high-profile events could be exploited to justify acts of violence against a range of possible targets.”  Is this just a hardware problem? 

John Stonestreet wrote a blog on June 8 that I wish I had written.  In it he quotes an Atlantic article asking the question, “Why are people acting so weird? … Bad behavior of all kinds—everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased … Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates.  Early 2021 saw the highest number of ‘unruly passenger’ incidents ever, according to the FAA.”  Again, this is much more than a gun problem.  True, you can shoot more people with an AR15 before the police arrive than you can with a muzzle-loading blunderbuss, but why would anyone want to do such a thing?  Could this be a software problem – not the weapon, but the heart?

So why are people acting so weird?  Popular answers are guns, the pandemic, political divisions, racial divisions, the southern border and more.  As we have seen, the problem is not weird guns but weird (twisted) people using them on weird targets.  Why?  There is no question the pandemic was a stress test that our society failed, but the trends were already established long before 2019.  We were already becoming isolated by our screens.  “Social drinking” at the screen “bar” – with all its sex, violence and discord – became a two-year, black-out drunk binge from which we struggle to emerge.  Why?  Our nation has been divided over moral and political issues before, notably in the 1850’s.  That led to a real insurrection.  Since Reagan and Clinton the gap has been widening, but mass shootings are pretty new – and not pretty.  Why?  The more we talk about racial tensions, the more racism we find – what would CRT do without it?  If it were to be solved, would the Democratic Party survive?  Just when real legal discrimination is being eliminated, tensions are rising.  The more we talk of toleration the more angry and intolerant we become.  Why?

All these and more are important, but is there something deeper?  Is there a societal affliction, if not disintegration?  It may be a fever, rising higher and higher until the antibodies disperse the virus.  Or we may not make it.  Why the shootings?  Lone, abused, dislocated young men (mostly white and affluent) with under-treated psychiatric disorders are dying in blazes of homicidal glory – in increasing frequency.  It is a desperate plea for significance.  Concurrently, fatherless urban children continue to gravitate to increasingly violent and well-armed criminal gangs in a desperate plea for family and male mentoring.  Fatherlessness seems to be a common thread – across racial and economic lines.  Other factors include the steady diet of graphic sex and violence, isolation and a mental health pandemic worse than Covid.

So why are people acting so weird?  Because they can?  “Gun violence” is the tip of the violence iceberg.  Expressive individualism gives us the freedom to act out what we are feeling, and what we are feeling is not good.  While most of us know better than to take violent action against our fellows, we see it portrayed every day on our screens and games with increasing intensity.  We hear angry and extreme words and slogans in the news and in social media (anti-social media?).  Our personal lives are full of chaos and confusion.  We are more isolated from real people, real in-person relationships and secondary organizations (like clubs and churches) than ever.  Friends, family, neighbors, schools and churches help us tame wild ideas and impulses – often without saying a word.  Where are these filters?

The lunatic fringe is getting wider and wider and the veneer of reasonableness over even the majority is getting thinner and thinner.  Is it acceptable to hate someone who disagrees with you?  Is it OK to fantasize robbery, rape and murder as long as you do not actually lift a finger?  Some will.  And the more of us who think it, the more unstable folks will actually do it.  And more of us are becoming unstable.

Where is this existential rage, this lawlessness, this contempt for others – the iceberg below the surface – coming from?

The iceberg of gratuitous violence in our society has multiple layers.  Our culture portrays it as normal ways to express oneself and solve problems.  Our public discourse is laced with angry hyperbole.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.  The isolated and marginal, without moral and spiritual ties to society, are most vulnerable to these voices.  Desperate people act desperately.  Hurt people hurt people.  Confused people confuse people.

Marxist theory seeks to create tensions rather than resolve them.  That is how a social problem is made and a revolution launched.  And most of us don’t know where it all came from.

Now we are getting to the waterline of the ‘berg.

The “social problem” strategy would not work, lone gunmen would not select the innocent, the gangs and mobs would not indulge such extreme violence if our society were not so angry, frustrated and misanthropic to begin with.

We struggle with why anyone would shoot up a school or a church.  We recognize that it has to be more than a matter of weaponry.  As a child I taught my son to always put down what he had in his hand when he was angry, but that would only limit the damage.  We have widespread – no endemic – software problems in our society: anger, self-centeredness, objectification, social and moral confusion.

But Fathers’ Day drives me to take a time-out to say something about fathers.  Fathers are vital to a healthy society.  Of course, we all had to have a father and a mother in order to get into this world.  Our mother’s choice gave us life, but our father’s choices are even more important.  If he made the right choice – to support motherhood – we have  reasonable chances of a happy start in life, graduating from high school, staying out of jail, drugs and problem pregnancies.  We have a good chance of making wise choices, staying healthy into retirement and building healthy families ourselves.  And we certainly will not want to shoot anybody.  Our prisons, rehabs and abortion clinics are full of the children of men who made the wrong choice – abandoning their women and children.  Children of male irresponsibility account for virtually all the gun violence.  Think about it.

We need fathers.  Bearing a child is certainly a sacrifice for a woman, but being a faithful man is a sacrifice, too.  It means you do not come first.  You are not free to run the streets and play the field.  It means you will have to lay down your happiness daily for the happiness of your family.  That is what being a civilized society requires of men.

The most obvious sickness of our society is our addiction to anger.  It is getting worse and worse.  Jesus said the one who hates is already a murderer in his heart.  Murder and destruction are what anger does.  The airways and cyberspace are full of hatred and incitement to murder.  Whipped into a collective frenzy it is a riot.  Stewed in isolation it is a mass shooting.  Anger breeds more anger.  We react to hurt by hurting others.  We react to prejudice with prejudice, mistreatment with mistreatment, lawlessness with lawlessness, evil with evil.  Trauma breeds trauma.  We sublimate our hurt – our hatred – with class hatred and ancestral hatred.  It is cumulative.  Gradually our society is becoming more and more vicious.  The only freedom from this addiction is in repentance and forgiveness.   

Another serious dysfunction of our society is our self-centeredness.  The baby-boomers were called “the me generation” and this (starting about 1970) could well be the me century.  We are focused to excess on our own consumption and entertainment, urged on by the steady drumbeat of advertising.  We are rent by swollen affluence into haves and have-nots, greed and envy.  At the same time we are becoming more and more isolated in our own hand-held worlds.  Covid-19 made this solitary confinement suddenly acute and dramatically demonstrated its harmful effects.  It has been difficult to get workers back to work and students back to study.  Automation may have masked the decline in personal productivity, but we are living to consume and not to produce.  The capitalism of serving society with products and services has become a capitalism of serving ourselves with more wealth.  The socialism of sharing our wealth has become a socialism of confiscating or destroying the wealth of others – tell me it isn’t so. 

This is not the way mankind is made to live.  We are communal animals.  Pure altruism may be rare, but it is the ideal – the god-like in us.  In a productive society we live for each other and for a higher purpose, if not for God himself.  A man who lives only for his own self is not quite a man.  We must have value – something to live for – bigger than ourselves.  Otherwise, life will be aimless, reckless, and often discarded in addiction, insanity and suicide.  Self-centeredness is destructive of any society.  Is there a chemotherapy for this cancer?

What happens when “it’s all about me?” “Me” friendships are unhealthy and co-dependent. “Me” marriages – if trial cohabitation ever gets that far – are short and rocky. When the spouse does not please, we walk away. The children of “me” are aborted, neglected, abandoned, and abused. “Me” police are corrupt bullies. “Me” soldiers do not fight. “Me” public servants are corrupt and serve only themselves. The more “Me” goes around, the more it comes around and civil society gradually crumbles. Marriage, family and a healthy society require sacrifice: “Them” people, if not “God” people. Houston, we have a problem!

The most virulent strain of self-centeredness is objectification.  Have we stopped thinking of humans as persons and begun treating them as things?  Our Judeo-Christian heritage holds each person as an image-bearer of God.  Yes, “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”  Our nation is founded on that creed.  As we lose our heritage, this sacredness is slipping away.  It becomes easier for us to endanger and abuse others.  A woman is a pop tart to be devoured and a baby in utero is a bug to be squashed or dismembered.  Life is no longer sacred.  Life can be violated to meet our needs, for our amusement, or for our convenience.  The most obvious examples are pornography and human trafficking.  Probably a majority of our society has accepted the practice of sexually devouring the flesh of another for “Me” – without regard to human dignity and personhood – poisoning every heterosexual (and homosexual) relationship.  This pandemic is even reaching for our children.

A third fault line in Western civilization is social and moral confusion. It is not just that we have a diversity of opinions and lifestyles, but we have no framework in which to negotiate conflict. Dissenters are not satisfied with toleration, but demand submission. Attacks on Judeo-Christian voices and teachings are relentless. The old morality is banned from the public square, but the new is required in public kindergarten. The transgender movement has been particularly disruptive of life. We cannot agree on what a woman is or who may enter her reserved spaces or play on her team. Confusing.

What is a mother?  What is a father?  What is a marriage?  What is a family?  The list goes on.  We have already noted the devastating effect of absent fathers.  The science is clear: unmarried partners do not stay together.  Single-parent families do not work well.  Same-sex families seem to show the same results.  What is sex for?  When it is practiced without regard for consequences bad things happen to women and children – because it is designed to produce human beings, not things.  When we deny reality, reality bites.  Children are what makes the species – and our civilization – continue.  Killing them, abandoning them, abusing them, corrupting them is a civil right to some and a great wrong to others.  Many of us are growing up without a clear moral foundation, without positive role models, and with conflicting messages from home, school and media.  Confusing.  Is it any wonder that some children feel a grievance against society?  Should we be surprised that a few act out in violence?  Family dysfunction is a symptom of a civilization in decline.

Time out.  If the cosmos has a Maker, it stands to reason that He knows what He programmed into the fabric of the human race – the right way, whether anyone follows it or not.  Jesus said, “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.  Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13-14).  The world’s wisest man wrote, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 16:25).  Which way will our culture choose?  Will you choose a course correction?

The wrong attitude towards humanity has led us to wrong attitudes toward sex and sexuality leading to wrong attitudes toward marriage leading to wrong attitudes toward family leading to wrong attitudes towards all kinds of things.  Messed-up sexuality, contempt for women and children, and contempt for marriage lead to messed-up children and youth.  They have a just grievance against society.  Unless there is a spiritual renewal, this grievance will follow them throughout their lives – to destruction and death.  Tell me it isn’t so.  Your “choice” may determine their destiny.

A fourth and most relevant fault line in our society is the loss of respect for authority and the rising tide of anarchy.  No government can survive the loss of legitimacy – not even a totalitarian regime.  If the football player – 300 lbs. of young muscle, helmet and pads – does not recognize the striped uniform of the flabby old guy, his calls mean nothing and he gets trampled.  The same goes for the policeman by the side of the road, much less the thin blue line facing the demonstrators.  Authority unrecognized is mere provocation. 

American democracy depends on the consent of the governed.  More and more people are ignoring authority.  Law enforcement is effectively weakened.  Just as seriously, we are choosing which laws we will observe – and enforce.  What if only one of the teams, what if only half the drivers or half the demonstrators accept the authority of the referee or the policeman?  What if the ref or policeman decides not to enforce the law?  We have seen that lately from the grassroots to the President.  We are beginning to expect it of prosecutors and judges, too.

When the authorities ignore the authority of law and constitution, we have a lawless state – a.k.a. tyranny. Even the king is responsible to God, and Presidents (and their bureaucrats) are responsible to their constitutions and their electors (God, too). When the authorities are unable or unwilling to assert their lawful authority, we have anarchy. If the police are absent or impotent, we cannot blame citizens for arming themselves. When large portions of the citizenry do not respect the law, it becomes unenforceable, and society does not work. When respect for moral law – morality – and the moral law-Giver – is weakened, everything else begins to crumble.

Today, in the USA, we have an unprecedented epidemic of shootings in our inner cities and soft targets (stores, churches and schools) – that used to be safe.  Is this caused by popular weapons (guns) or by the people among whom these weapons are popular for antisocial uses?  So is it our societal addiction to guns or our addiction to anger and hatred, to violence, to self and objectification?  Can a fatherless, lawless society survive with or without guns?  Is it inherently possible to disarm criminals by legal measures?  Only if criminals respect the law and have the moral fiber to do the right thing.  A moral renewal, one person at a time, is our only hope as a nation.  Can we turn this around?  Not without help.

David W. Heughins (“ProfDave”) is Adjunct Professor of History at Nazarene Bible College. He holds a BA from Eastern Nazarene College and a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota. He is the author of (2020). He is a Vietnam veteran and is retired, living with his daughter and three grandchildren in Connecticut.