A Heritage Worth Preserving
I’m not much of a gun guy. It’s one of those things I always wish I knew how to do, but never got around to, like the piano and Spanish. But my dad hunts regularly, so for his birthday last year I took a hunter safety course so that I could someday join him.
For sixteen hours over two days, I listened as a cadre of old men in “blaze orange” reiterated the three rules of gun safety. I learned to identify different types of firearms and their components, how ammunition is measured, and how to make prudent decisions about when and where to shoot. The course emphasized what can go wrong if the rules are ignored. Each year, thousands of people are injured or killed in gun-related accidents, almost always due to negligence. I heard stories of parents shooting kids, teens shooting their friends, and errant bullets killing neighbors.
I am surprised at how affected I have been by my class. The instructors, all retired military, taught me to respect firearms and the culture of hunting. They endowed me with a sense of the tremendous responsibility that comes with handling a rifle or shotgun, while also impressing on me the special relationship between hunting and nature. These were true conservationists, who spoke at length of their love for the woods and the animals they pursued. They saw themselves as heirs to a tradition going back thousands of years. The woods of northern and coastal Virginia are full of history – and the descendant deer and turkey of those that enabled the first Americans to survive.
America’s heritage of hunting brings to mind another side of the story of guns in this country: firearms and the fight for independence. As frustration over the unjust policies imposed by the British crown swelled, America’s leaders declared independence. A ragtag group of militia men armed with Brown Bess and Pennsylvania rifles saw it as their right and their duty to dissolve the political bands connecting the colonies to England, and instituted a new government. Later, this new government would rest upon a Constitution detailing certain fundamental rights, including gun ownership. In the second Amendment, the Constitution states:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
This statement is best understood in its historical context. The preservation of freedom animated the new Constitution. The young nation had just overthrown a tyrannical regime through war. The right to gun ownership was included among the ten freedoms made explicit in the Bill of Rights because these early Americans were sensitive to future encroachments on liberty that might necessitate acts of self-defense. The Founders knew that restricting self defense, like restricting speech, would be among the first acts of a rising tyranny.
Two-hundred years later, we face a cultural crisis that warrants reconsideration of the right to gun ownership. I’ll never forget meeting a young woman in a wheelchair at a Bible study in Denver, who I later learned was a victim of the Columbine High School massacre. Such instances of gun violence cause us to ask, “Was this preventable?” Of course, these infamous incidents are a fraction of the violence that occurs each day, especially in the poor neighborhoods of cities like Chicago and Washington, DC.
Putting aside extremists on both sides of the debate, sensible gun laws are uncontroversial. Few question the relatively minor inconvenience of waiting periods, background checks, trigger locks, and licensing. The bigger question is whether the right to keep and bear a gun should be more highly restricted? Must we ask those who participate responsibly in the use of firearms for sport and sustenance to stop? The answer relies on whether we believe doing so would keep those hell-bent on hurting others from accomplishing their mission. Unfortunately, there is little reason to believe it would.
Regulations won’t stop those keen on breaking the law. Premeditated violence, like in the case of school shootings and gang warfare, means the perpetrators have time to find weapons on the black market. Even if we were able to totally rid the nation of firearms, criminals would devise other means of destruction. Suicide bombs are a fact of life in some nations. We see the devastation caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in others.
The responsible ownership and use of firearms is an American tradition and a Constitutionally-protected right that ought not be unreasonable restricted. Ultimately, violence is a symptom of a cultural problem that goes much deeper than the mere availability of certain weapons. An effective approach to solving America’s problem with violence would focus on the underlying causes, such as mental illness and psychological disorder, the breakdown of the traditional family, and poverty. And, of course, Christians must continue to spread our message of life and love, knowing that ultimately the Gospel is the only impediment to violence and sin.
Eric,
Thank you for your essay. I think you highlighted a very important matter that extremists too easily lose sight of. How best to enact gun control or protect the 2nd amendment are issues of degree and prudence and not of direct moral application (even though the moral edges are present throughout). Practical questions must be asked as to whether legislative, administrative, and enforcement actions to more significantly limit access to guns would actually inhibit access to certain guns in such a way as to reduce their criminal use. The harsh reality is that most gun violence, as far as I understand (someone please challenge me if I'm mistaken), is carried out by persons using weapons they illicitly acquired. In most instances, therefore, applicable laws are already on the books.
Although I think some genuine tweaking needs to take place involving certain assault weapons and access to weapons for certain persons with mental illness, for the most part, America's problems with gun violence, which far outstrips gun violence in other rich countries (by shocking margins), are problems rooted in other deeply harmful social problems. The guns are the medium by which other social (and/or spiritual) pathologies express themselves.
Thanks again Eric for making this issue a matter of prudence and giving us pause before we, understandably at times like this, locate our moral outrage on one of the extremes of this debate in the wake of such events as Columbine or the recent Colorado theater shooting.
Nathan
Eric,
Thank you for your essay. I think you highlighted a very important matter that extremists too easily lose sight of. How best to enact gun control or protect the 2nd amendment are issues of degree and prudence and not of direct moral application (even though the moral edges are present throughout). Practical questions must be asked as to whether legislative, administrative, and enforcement actions to more significantly limit access to guns would actually inhibit access to certain guns in such a way as to reduce their criminal use. The harsh reality is that most gun violence, as far as I understand (someone please challenge me if I'm mistaken), is carried out by persons using weapons they illicitly acquired. In most instances, therefore, applicable laws are already on the books.
Although I think some genuine tweaking needs to take place involving certain assault weapons and access to weapons for certain persons with mental illness, for the most part, America's problems with gun violence, which far outstrips gun violence in other rich countries (by shocking margins), are problems rooted in other deeply harmful social problems. The guns are the medium by which other social (and/or spiritual) pathologies express themselves.
Thanks again Eric for making this issue a matter of prudence and giving us pause before we, understandably at times like this, locate our moral outrage on one of the extremes of this debate in the wake of such events as Columbine or the recent Colorado theater shooting.
Nathan
Eric,
Thank you for your essay. I think you highlighted a very important matter that extremists too easily lose sight of. How best to enact gun control or protect the 2nd amendment are issues of degree and prudence and not of direct moral application (even though the moral edges are present throughout). Practical questions must be asked as to whether legislative, administrative, and enforcement actions to more significantly limit access to guns would actually inhibit access to certain guns in such a way as to reduce their criminal use. The harsh reality is that most gun violence, as far as I understand (someone please challenge me if I'm mistaken), is carried out by persons using weapons they illicitly acquired. In most instances, therefore, applicable laws are already on the books.
Although I think some genuine tweaking needs to take place involving certain assault weapons and access to weapons for certain persons with mental illness, for the most part, America's problems with gun violence, which far outstrips gun violence in other rich countries (by shocking margins), are problems rooted in other deeply harmful social problems. The guns are the medium by which other social (and/or spiritual) pathologies express themselves.
Thanks again Eric for making this issue a matter of prudence and giving us pause before we, understandably at times like this, locate our moral outrage on one of the extremes of this debate in the wake of such events as Columbine or the recent Colorado theater shooting.
Nathan