Daily Episcopalian

by Donald Schell

Hearing the terrible story from Ellicott City, Maryland - a homeless man killing a parish priest and parish administrator and then shooting himself, I felt again how suddenly and completely guns change things. And though I live on the other coast from Maryland, our church is small or our connections wide - Mary-Marguerite Kohn, the co-rector of St. Peter’s had been my daughter-in-law’s teacher in Loyola Maryland’s graduate program in pastoral counseling. The shooting in Ellicott City is our story, our church’s story, and it’s personal.

I was surprised to hear people say of that shooting, “I never imagined something like that could happen in a church.” Church isn’t safe. It never has been safe, but it’s seeming more dangerous today thanks to people’s ready access to guns.

I thought of Dr. George Tiller, murdered while serving as an usher in his church on a Sunday morning because, in his medical practice, he offered women legal abortions.
Closer to my home in San Francisco, I thought the parish in this diocese where a distraught divorced father in a custody fight sent someone to get his children out of Sunday School and shot them and himself in the church parking lot.

In a society that chooses to arm people for violence, the church is no safer than a high school, a shopping mall, a university campus, a post office, an office building or any of those other places where principle- or suffering-crazed obsession or other insanity has triggered random violence.

What would it take our society and nation to develop a will to limit access to weapons designed to kill human beings? What would it take us to make a real public conversation about violence? What would it take us to stand up to the NRA?

Recently The New York Times ran an opinion page piece by a hunter who had resigned his NRA membership because, over the time he’d been a member he’d seen the National Rifle Association, become the Concealed Handgun Association, the Semi-Automatic Weapon Association, and the Armor-Piercing Bullet association. None of this, he said, serves hunting. The NRA doesn’t serve hunters or public safety, it serves the corporate interests of weapon manufacturers who have found a substantial market for the weapons people use against people. America is the most heavily armed nation in the world. And of first world nations our rate of gun suicide and gun murder makes us one of the most dangerous. This hunter’s voice of protest joined police and law enforcement officers have been making the same point for some time. But it’s difficult to find lawmakers who aren’t afraid of the NRA. An elected official advocating reasonable controls on murder weapons know when it comes time for re-election the NRA will target them with massive advertising support for a gun friendly opponent.

As a priest, as a city dweller, as a person who likes to walk and doesn’t believe gated communities make us safe, as someone who enjoys the energy and diversity of great cities, I’m wondering what it would take for shared work and public places that count on easy public access to join forces together to demand new gun laws.

State and national legislators are afraid of the NRA’s money. But is advertising money the final word in electoral politics. Have corporate interests bought the controlling share in our electoral process?

The NRA, liberally funded by gun manufacturers, fiercely defends the ‘safety’ and ‘freedom’ guns give us. Do corporate dollars always speak louder than shared concern expressed in a public voice? What could we learn from other life and death public health struggles? What was the people’s part in standing down the cigarette manufacturers lobbying dollars? How did physicians and cancer researchers and cancer victims and bereaved families enact laws limiting smoking in public places and raise taxes on cigarettes for anti-smoking campaigns. (And what can cautionary tale do we learn from the tobacco lobby’s recent rebound victory in California preventing what initial polls showed would be landslide vote mandating a California tobacco tax hike that would have brought California’s tobacco tax in line with other states?)

Easy access to guns puts all our public assembly places, our gathering places, anywhere services of any kind are offered to friend and strangers at risk. If people who go to church combined their voices with people who enjoy movies and theater, people who shop in grocery stores or malls, people who attend colleges or send their children to schools, could we make a voting voice loud enough that legislators would listen?

Church and so many other activities that we value depend on people’s willingness to venture into public spaces. In a war zone, people don’t venture out to church or school. Stores and theaters struggle to survive. Look at the struggling businesses and tiny churches in our poorest neighborhoods, the prime market for the gun manufacturers. Where are those neighborhoods’ movie theaters? Why do the large grocery store chains that sell groceries at reasonable cost avoid those neighborhoods? The war zone is all around us. How can those of us who believe in community and public life defend the safety of our public places?

No other first world country has a rate of gun deaths like the United States of America. That’s the safety and freedom that the NRA has won for us in their skewed interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

What’s at stake here? Manufacturing profits and advertising dollars convince us that we need to arm ourselves against the criminals and desperate, deluded people that they’re also arming. Responding to “A letter from an exhausted, exasperated young person” posted as the Lead here at the Café, Murdoch Matthew recently offered statistics from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, detailing the radical drop over the past thirty years in public participation, social gathering, and the conclusion that “During the last third of the twenty century all forms of social capital fell off precipitously”

There are undoubtedly other things that have contributed to this precipitous decline, but what caught my attention is Putnam’s reporting an enormous increase in people’s reported fear and mistrust of strangers. In a culture of fear, wouldn’t we expect to lose some ability to gather people whether for pleasure or for the good of others?

Hearing one terrible story after another, gun deaths in America first haunt us, but then they numb us. We avert our eyes because we feel powerless. Numbness, that is our unacknowledged fear and denial make us pretend places like churches or schools are safe.

Ellicott City got me thinking about times guns have come close to home for me. I was startled at thirteen personal gun stories I carry, my fifty years worth. It took me several days of noting down reminders to gather the list, because recalling some of them was an effort. I’m as much in denial as any American. Do you have a list like this -

My 1960’s gun stories -

1. As a young teenage in hiking near my grandmother’s summer place, a friend on I came on a path we’d never seen before. It led to tiny shed in dense forest on a bit of public land, something that sounded like the place the killer had lived near St. Peter’s, Endicott City. Being kids, we looked in and found a stash of porn magazines, the biggest handgun I’ve ever seen, and shelves and shelves of canned beans. We were smart enough to know that staying around there was a bad idea. My friend wanted to take the gun. “That could be trouble,” I said. But we were frightened enough of “the guy” who lived there that we didn’t tell anyone about what we found. Four or five years later, I went back, thinking that if “the guy” was still there that the park rangers should know. The shed was empty and the roof partially collapsed. It had obviously been abandoned for at a couple of winters.

2. In college one night, a drunken classmate screaming his estranged girlfriend’s name repeatedly woke the campus. Next morning, we learned that he’d evaded the campus police for several hours, hiding between his stalking forays while terrified friends who knew he was carrying a handgun tried to find him and let them take the gun away. His friends had finally discovered him shortly before dawn, curled up with his gun asleep under some stairs. They disarmed him (and got rid of the gun) and got him back to his room.

In seminary New York City’s Chelsea in the late 1960’s we heard gunfire every day.

My 1970’s gun stories –

3. The only gun incident I recall from my time as a college chaplain at Yale was a student killed in a mugging. I didn’t know the student though friends did. He’d been walking home after dark through an area of New Haven we generally avoided. And as a Westerner, I remember the uncomfortable irony that Winchester and Colt, ‘the guns that won the West’ and figured in shoot-it-out Western movie and legend had been manufactured in New Haven and Hartford.

4. As a parish priest in Idaho, a homeless transient threatened me in my office with a rifle because I’d told her all the churches in our town contributed to the Salvation Army and they handled all requests for transient aid. She didn’t point it at me. She just said, “I could kill you with this.” And I said, “Please put it away, and let me call my friend the Salvation Army lieutenant to get you the help you need.” She did, I phoned, and he helped her.

5. Our senior warden in Idaho wore a sidearm pistol to church and everywhere. He was mayor of a tiny neighboring town and had fired the town’s police officer for stealing guns from the police stock and selling them. State police told our parishioner he’d better carry a gun and watch his back.

6. Later still serving in Idaho, an elderly parishioner told the congregation she’d wakened to two armed burglars going through the jewelry on her dresser. She screamed the names of her two grown sons with such courage and clarity that the intruders fled, never guessing that the house was empty except for her. Though her presence of mind drove them off, she lost her vibrant good health and her will to live and died of pneumonia (her sons said of a broken heart) months later.

My 1980’s gun stories -

7. My wife and I and our four year old daughter moved to San Francisco to join a handful of people founding St. Gregory’s Church the year after ex-City Supervisor Dan White bypassed a metal detector to kill Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in City Hall. Our first gun experience in the city was a strangely anxious visitor who’d come to church for two Sundays before she showed various parishioners she was carrying an unlicensed concealed pistol in her purse. Parishioners told the clergy and we confronted the woman who showed us the gun. We told her she could not bring the gun to church, and that if she did we’d report her to the police.

8. Later, while St. Gregory’s was still renting a separate chapel of Trinity Church on San Francisco’s Cathedral Hill, our neighborhood of apartment houses, senior homes and hotels, and St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, suffered the skilled assault of a self-trained body-armored ‘survivalist’ laden with semi-automatic weapons. He had hijacked a car after his own broke down. The stranded driver called the police who guessed his route through the city and set up a barricade. His way completely blocked by police cars with their lights flashing, the ‘survivalist’ got out of the car and began shooting, and in a standoff that lasted over an hour he killed police officers and people trapped in surrounding buildings until a police sharpshooter killed him. Two days later we began a candlelit prayer vigil at the shooting site and then marched with people of the neighborhood and a large contingent of San Francisco police officers to continue the service at Trinity/St. Gregory’s, a block and a half away.

9. Downtown at the 101 California Street office tower, a failed businessman armed with semi-automatic weapons killed seven people, and wounded four others before he was killed. After that shooting, the canon pastor of Grace Cathedral and I organized a march downtown with broad citizen and police participation.

My 1990’s gun stories -

10. By this time the church had purchased property and was gathering energy and making plans to build our own church building. Walking home one night from a parish meeting in our new neighborhood, I was robbed at gunpoint, five doors away from my house.

11. The convenience store directly across the street from us has been robbed twice, the second time, the owner tried to resist the robbers and was pistol-whipped. We began a neighborhood watch on our block.

12. Early one New Year’s morning our next-door neighbor had his guns taken away by the police after someone reported he’d been firing them into the sky. He simply bought new guns, but told us angrily that he was convinced it was my daughter who had reported his New Year’s celebratory volleys to the police. A year or so later our neighbor shot and killed a tenant who had threatened him.

13. Our older son was robbed at gunpoint his senior year in high school. He was downtown, on his way home late from a graduation party. The robbers had directed to an ATM to take out as much money as he could withdraw.

My 2000’s gun stories –

14. My uncle in Virginia committed suicide with a handgun. He was grieving my aunt’s death, desperately lonely and struggling with depression. His daughter had gotten the police to take a gun from him because he was threatening to commit suicide with it. He had no trouble getting a new gun.

Retelling the stories, I wonder at what I did and didn’t do, what I did and didn’t think of. I also know as a pastor that when I’ve told these stories and thought about them with people that I’ve heard surprisingly many stories like them. As a preacher I want us to know that life is dangerous and that sooner or later we’ll all die. But as a pastor, when we’re sharing these stories, I’m also hearing my own and others feeling powerless or uncertain how to act when guns are everywhere. Do our gun stories, what we’ve experienced and what we hear, keep some people home while others wonder what someone acting strangely in church might be capable of doing?

What would it take for us together to speak against the profitable business of manufacturing ready means for criminals and madmen to kill? What if we began to tell our stories and listen to others’ stories? Could we find common voice with other people who count on the safety of churches, schools, stores and shopping malls, offices buildings, theaters, and the streets we walk on?

Ultimately the cost of Columbine, of Texas Tower, of Virginia Tech, and of stories like mine and yours, stories of places we live, of friends and neighbors, stories of guns pointed at people we know and love, ultimately the cost is fear, not just fear of strangers but fear of any face-to-face community.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

Comments (24)

I completely empathize with the Rev. Schell’s essay. I have experience such incidents myself. Allow me a moment to speak about what I have learned from living in the Ozarks. Gun owners (and there are a lot of them down here) are missing from Rev. Schell’s essay.

Country folks would say that every single one of his gun assault stories is the exact reason why they need to stay armed, not disarm. They have a saying down here: “When every second counts, remember: the police are but minutes away.” They feel at-risk in their environment, and see any attempt to control firearms as a threat to their safety.

Also, they simply do not trust gun-control advocates. They see us as urban elitists who live in a fantasy world and have no good intentions regarding rural folk. So far as they are concerned, the crime problems of the cities are city folk’s own creation. It’s due to lack of law enforcement, lack of strong sentencing, and lack of morals. Warped as it is, they are convinced their perspective is accurate, and think they are being scape-goated as gun owners for the failed culture of the urban elites.

Thirdly, they love guns down here. Nearly every man above the age of 30 has been in the military. They go hunting like city folks go golfing. They talk about guns, trade them, hold shooting tournaments, shooting clinics, et al. I’ve been to local estate auctions where the guns are the single largest draw – when the guns are sold, the crowd decreases by half.

If we want to see a change in our gun culture, it is these people we will need to persuade, not the NRA. Activists could do an end-run around the NRA with some backroom deals in state capitols or D.C., and make certain kinds of gun ownership, or certain kinds of guns, illegal. Gun owners, however, will not comply with any new restrictions, and it will turn hundreds of thousands of lawful citizens into criminals overnight. And then we’d have to enforce the law. How? According to the BBC, the US has the largest number of gun owners in the world: 60 million people own over 200 million firearms. There are only 137 million registered cars in the US.

No doubt, we are one of the most violent countries on the planet. Increasingly, we use violence as a problem-solving tool, both domestically and internationally. I’m not so sure that opposing the NRA is going to help reduce the violence. We need to address the culture of weapons and violence which pervades our nation, and do it in a sensible, persistent manner. That is going to take generations, in my opinion. It’s a good movement to join, however, and I applaud Rev. Schell for raising it.

Kevin McGrane

Posted by Maplewood | July 13, 2012 12:43 PM

Kevin,

I readily acknowledge my writing from a substantially urban experience. And my small taste of other settings gives additional weight to what you're saying about the perspective of non-urban America.

When I moved to Caldwell, Idaho in 1976, I figured I knew small town America from having lived in Santa Fe and Princeton. And interestingly, telling myself that I was ready for small town and red state culture, I didn't think to include that I'd lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana for a year. Princeton and Santa Fe were closer to the size of Caldwell, but culturally Lake Charles with 70,000 or so people was much, much closer.

In Idaho my senior warden wore a pistol all the time (including ushering in church) because as mayor of small town near us he'd fired a police officer who'd been stealing weapons and while the case was pending the the fired cop out on bail, State Police had told my friend he'd better carry a weapon.

And I had a junior warden who did his best to introduce me to the pleasures of pheasant hunting. We spent some very pleasant afternoons walking irrigation ditch banks and the edges of grain field and he and I fired his shotguns at several pheasants. Eventually I thanked him the great afternoons we'd had and his next afternoon out without me he shot his limit. My wife and I also got game delivered to our door by parishioners. The day we spent plucking and cleaning a wild goose was an interesting exercise for any carnivore.

And I had parishioners who had grown up in the last of the Wild West - mining towns in the mountains around us where, pre World War I, there'd been arguments settled with shootouts on the street.

Nonetheless, I return to the NRA. The big money manufacturing interest doesn't want Episcopalians in San Francisco talking to Episcopalians in the Ozarks to hear one another's experience and think together about hunting, weapons, freedom, and safety. We're not only the most heavily armed nation in the world, we're a major weapons supplier to the rest of the world.

So, yes, change would require all of us getting past fear of each other and interpreting (dismissing) people different from us because their (our) assumptions about the world are prejudicial or fantasy. Yes, it could take us a generation, and as our country becomes more violent and dangerous and our population (including the urban population) more heavily armed from fear, the conversation gets harder.

Still, I think that the church and other groups or institutions that do their work in public spaces have an urgent common interest in making those public spaces less subject to troubled or deranged people with guns.

Kevin, you're telling an essential part of the story and reminding us that finding our way back to talking and thinking of our common good will always ask us to listen to and value experiences that are very different from our own.

Thank you.

Donald

Posted by Donald Schell | July 13, 2012 2:06 PM

Donald: Thank you for your essay and comments. The entire topic (topics?) is very close to my heart. I am increasingly concerned about the isolation and alienation of the poor and rural from the rest of our nation, creating their own ghetto and keeping San Francisco from speaking with the Ozarks. Their isolation is fertile ground for exploitation and continued poverty.

You are spot-on regarding the financial motivation of our gun culture. That, and the theological challenges regarding the culture of violence. Two items to consider:

1. The Sunday newspaper ad inserts: the ones we get in the Ozarks have the same items in the city with one addition, and that’s the firearms section. Right after the sale on shirts and shorts is the two pages on shotguns, pistols, and gun gear. One of the most recent ads I saw featured a 30-calibre semi-automatic rifle that looked exactly like an assault rifle, and it came along with its own bonus survivalist kit. “Be ready!” it advertised. No joke.

2. The local So. Baptist association holds an annual event called “Outdoors and The Truth”, combining hunting and fishing with evangelism. It is widely attended, and is their single biggest event of the year. They equate gun ownership and hunting with Christian family values, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and religious/political liberty.

These are just two of the cultural mountains we must climb. The gun manufacturers are exploiting (even reinforcing) much of the rural community’s culture and cultural paranoia for their own benefit. Also, we much address the association of guns with fundamentalist Christianity – gun control is going to be, among other things, a theological fight. Not a debate, a fight. I hope we are up for an actual fight.

Also, there is an ancillary issue to the gun culture, which is the militarism of rural America. From what I’ve been able to glean, a significant number of our military personnel come from small towns and rural settings, along with the inner-city kids. There are so many rural young men (and a rising number of young women) who are combat-trained, disproportionate to the rest of our population, that it’s alarming. They are told that violence and killing, under the right circumstances, are good and honorable actions sanctioned by their government. IOW, violence is a legitimate method to solve human problems. They carry this ethos with them when they leave the armed forces. Martin Luther King saw militarism as one of the three main problems challenging our nation over 40 years ago – he was so prescient.

And I apologize for monopolizing the comments on your essay. There is just so much here to address.

Posted by Maplewood | July 13, 2012 4:28 PM

Kevin, in this neck of the rural landscape they'd say,"Why are the urbanites so crazy?" They love their guns here, yes. There is gun crime here, yes, but it's much less prevalent and much more personal(a spouse going after the cheating spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend), not a robbery at an ATM. Much of the crime increases here are caused by drugs and gangs, urban crimes spreading into rural areas. So around here they'd say, "Take the log out of your own eye before taking the speck out of your brothers." It's the culture, morals, etc. not only the existence of guns that are the problem.

Side note: Did they really ban guns in TEC churches last week? One of our local deputies who works Sundays and was in uniform showed up at the church I attend instead of the Episcopal church he usually attends saying he couldn't go there anymore.

Chris Harwood.

Posted by Chris H. | July 15, 2012 3:13 PM

I would say let everyone own guns, but slap serious control over ammunition and the tools/equipment to make it.

Posted by Troy Haliwell | July 16, 2012 11:51 AM

Chris: ref: no guns in TEC church: I have not heard of such a thing. News to me!

A quick Google finds zero stories on it.

And why would someone WANT to carry a gun into a house of God? To me, that sends up all kinds of red flags.

Posted by Maplewood | July 16, 2012 2:13 PM

I believe it was resolution D 003. Scott Gunn wrote about it on his blog. Was it passed? I'm having trouble finding a definite answer.

Law enforcement/military/border patrol are a very large portion of the population/workforce here. They also don't get weekends off, so by saying no guns you eliminate those who come to church in uniform before work(Weapons for some are considered part of the uniform and NOT to be left behind ANYWHERE). Most don't attend Episcopal churches,true, but passing this resolution gives them one more reason not to.

TEC around here often comes across as anti-military, so maybe TEC doesn't care if they come or not?

Chris Harwood

Posted by Chris H. | July 16, 2012 9:22 PM

Chris, we are trying to get you a definite answer on whether that resolution passed. But we can say for sure that if a resolution passed, it "requested" something. It didn't compel anything.

Posted by Jim Naughton | July 16, 2012 9:35 PM

I guess I’d complexify this problem a bit and ask two questions: “What is the problem that having the gun is supposed to solve?” and “Can this problem be solved in a different way?” If the problem is that one wants to hunt game to eat it, having a gun seems fine. I prefer that other people kill the meat I eat, in other ways, but eating the deer one has shot seems no different than eating the tomato one has grown.

What about “I need this gun so I can kill myself.” That’s a problem we already know how to solve: suicide identification and prevention isn’t so hard, especially if one focuses on the groups at highest risk.

What about “I need this gun to show I am the most powerful guy.” Again, that’s a solvable problem --- there are lots of different ways for a man to demonstrate that he is powerful. We don’t do such a good job of teaching men a variety of ways to demonstrate that --- there’s more than sports --- but we could do a better job.

What about “I need this gun so I can win an argument with my neighbor.” Again, there is something here that can be taught and can be learned --- that is, how to conduct a verbal argument with someone, and how to order it so that everyone can win.

Finally, what about “I need a gun to protect myself against the government.” That, also, is a problem of learning how to talk, how to argue, how to find and use evidence --- how to get involved in the government, so the government is me, not someone else far away.

All of these arguments in favor of guns are arguments about having power --- by people who feel that they do not have any power. Surely, that is a fundamental problem central to our activities as Christians: how to transform the power-less into people who have power! Therefore, I think that gun control is fundamentally a theological issue, and it is an issue about power that our Christian beliefs and tradition give us lots of knowledge of how to solve!

Posted by Laurel Cornell | July 17, 2012 8:12 PM

Jim, to have the "Congress" of the church request the entire church do something is to send a message louder than the local group to say that those who don't comply are "out of step" or breaking the rules even if those rules aren't enforced. It also gives a subtle or not so subtle impression that guns are evil and by extension, those with them are bad, so the thousands of airmen and others in uniform here, assuming they heard about it, probably wouldn't be impressed. They might respect the church for their choice, that doesn't mean they will feel welcome. The border patrol already know they aren't welcome because of TEC's stance on illegal aliens.

Posted by Chris H. | July 17, 2012 11:57 PM

One of the headlines in today's Denver Post is that requests for background checks in Colorado to purchase firearms jumped 41% over the weekend. One gun shop reported 15 to 20 people waiting at the door Friday morning to make purchases.

Posted by David O'Rourke | July 24, 2012 12:05 PM

In Switzerland every male joins the military and is required - even after he gets out - to own and maintain in his home the equivalent of an AK-47 - what you call an "assault" rifle. Their per capita rate of gun ownership is higher than ours. Their "gun culture" exceeds ours. If gun ownership alone - especially ownership of "assault" rifles - was the cause of gun violence then Switzerland's streets would be rivers of blood.

Why aren't they? Simple. Common sense tells you that if a criminal has to worry that potential victims are armed, then he or she is much less likely to attack someone. This is borne out by our own experiences here in the U.S. When Florida became a "shall issue" state - which means that the State MUST issue you a Concealed Carry Weapon permit unless they can prove you shouldn't have one - the rate of violent crime went DOWN - directly contradicting your premise that somehow permitting law-abiding people to carry guns is contributing to problems with gun-related violence. And this is not isolated. Numerous States and locations have liberalized their gun laws. NONE of them have seen gun-related crimes increase. ALL of them have seen gun-related crimes stay the same or drop when they have not interfered with their citizens' right to keep and bear arms.

So - what's your rationale for keeping law-abiding people from keeping and bearing arms? Since it's proven that doing so actually keeps gun-related crimes from dropping?

Also, have a look in Chicago. It has some of the most anti-civil rights laws in the country (owning and carrying guns is a civil right, folks, just like free speech and voting). Yet it is suffering far higher gun-related crime rates than anywhere else? Seems there's a very good relationship between restricting people's civil rights and gun violence.

Ron Fox.

Posted by RonF | July 24, 2012 4:26 PM

"America is the most heavily armed nation in the world."

On a per capita basis that's highly inaccurate. In Switzerland every male citizen serves in the army and after getting out continues to have the equivalent of a fully automatic AR-15 in their home. The U.S. doesn't come close to that. Why aren't Switzerland streets swimming in blood? Because everyone's armed, so the criminals know they're courting death if they try anything.

"I’m wondering what it would take for shared work and public places that count on easy public access to join forces together to demand new gun laws."

Abandoning their childlike fears and admitting that an objective look at the data shows that permitting law-abiding citizens to carry guns makes public spaces safer, not unsafe.

"State and national legislators are afraid of the NRA’s money. But is advertising money the final word in electoral politics. Have corporate interests bought the controlling share in our electoral process? The NRA, liberally funded by gun manufacturers, fiercely defends the ‘safety’ and ‘freedom’ guns give us."

Pounding the NRA sounds good, but it draws attention away from the fact that the majority of Americans want to retain and expand the right to keep and bear arms. And the right to keep and bear arms does give us safety and freedom from those who could otherwise do us violence.

"Do corporate dollars always speak louder than shared concern expressed in a public voice?"

One look at the polls tells you that the loudest shared concern regarding guns that the public is expressing is that they want gun laws that limit law-abiding citizens' civil rights struck down, not made more restrictive.

The public are not sheep. They are not being influenced by the NRA. The NRA is being influenced by them!

"What could we learn from other life and death public health struggles? What was the people’s part in standing down the cigarette manufacturers lobbying dollars? How did physicians and cancer researchers and cancer victims and bereaved families enact laws limiting smoking in public places and raise taxes on cigarettes for anti-smoking campaigns."

Cigarettes kill people. Guns save people from being crime victims anywhere from 800,000 to 2,300,000 times a year; see http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/kleck1.html .

"Easy access to guns puts all our public assembly places, our gathering places, anywhere services of any kind are offered to friend and strangers at risk."

Prove it. Prove that public areas in States where people can legally buy and carry guns are not as safe as areas where people cannot. Your assertion is easily falsifiable. In fact, it is readily shown that easy access to guns makes public places safer. Guns bought legally by law-abiding citizens save lives, they do not destroy them. It's guns bought illegally (you think that's easy access? Try it sometime.) that are used to kill people. Every mass killing has taken place in a "gun-free" zone. None of them take place in locations where people are free to carry guns.

"If people who go to church combined their voices with people who enjoy movies and theater, people who shop in grocery stores or malls, people who attend colleges or send their children to schools, could we make a voting voice loud enough that legislators would listen?"

Check the polls. Most of those people want to be able to carry guns as they please. And legislators are bound by the Constitution.

Posted by RonF | July 24, 2012 6:15 PM

I entered a couple of comments earlier but I didn't understand the signing policy (I thought it was automatically put in). My name is Ron Fox.

Posted by RonF | July 24, 2012 11:32 PM

It seems quite arrogant to me that Rev. Schell seems to think that people who want our civil rights restricted are intelligent, enlightened and independent thinkers, but people who favor their restoration are fear-ridden and have their thinking dominated by corporately-funded propaganda.

Posted by RonF | July 24, 2012 11:37 PM

Kevin:

"and why would someone WANT to carry a gun into a house of God?"

Because they'll need it at their next stop and they don't want to leave such a valuable object in the car? And I brought my shotgun into church once. It was Mens' Club night and one of the other member's sons needed to finish off Shotgun Shooting Merit Badge by cleaning one. So he cleaned mine. It was more convenient to do that than for either one of us to go to the other's home.

Laurel:

“What is the problem that having the gun is supposed to solve?”

I find it interesting that while you spun out hypothetical questions that few people purchase guns for, you completely failed to consider the question that most non-recreational people buy guns for: "How can I prevent someone bigger and stronger than me (or a group that outnumbers me) from committing a violent crime against me?"

“Can this problem be solved in a different way?”

I am open to suggestion. I would suggest that if your answer is "Dialogue" or some other such, few violent criminals are up for talking much in the middle of a mugging or rape.

Ronald Fox

Posted by RonF | July 24, 2012 11:54 PM

Ron: thank you for your comments. Some observations, please…

Swiss Army: I think comparing a trained and supervised militia to the general population of the USA regarding firearms is comparing apples to oranges.

Also, in 2007, the Swiss government decided to recall all ammo held by its militia. Essentially, the militia have rifles but no ammo in their homes. Why? Too dangerous.

Also, buying a gun for private use falls under the Swiss 1999 Gun Act, which controls the purchase and carrying of firearms.

I recommend anyone read “Guns Politics in Switzerland” at Wiki for a good overview. According to Wiki, there are about 1.2M guns in Switzerland. We have about 100X’s more. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of guns.

I also think you’ve missed my point: guns control is not as easy a thing to enact as one might think. We need to address our propensity for violence as a problem-solving tool rather than guns.

BTW: we passed a “concealed carry” law in Missouri some years ago, and it was a major non-event in terms of crime: it neither increased nor decreased. Ditto for gun violence: no increase, no decrease.

Posted by Maplewood | July 25, 2012 11:53 AM

Ron,

I've been called arrogant before and expect I will again. When I hear it, I do want to take a look and see what I'm saying that prompted it. I do think fear has a strange place in American culture. Gun control isn't far from the only place it shows up. And yes, 'liberals' and 'conservatives' both have their habitual, phobic ways of acting.

I don't think my essay advocated banning guns. I simply raised a question of what blocks us and our politicians from considering legitimate, rational control.

How are questions licensing, training, and public interest legitimate in determining who has access to driving a vehicle on public roadways and an attack on freedoms when we're talking about guns?

I will have a look at your statistics. You won't be surprised to hear that I'm skeptical of the source. I've never heard the assertion that guns save people's lives as often as 2,300,000 times a year. It seems wildly implausible, but intuition or what we call "common sense" can mislead us, I'll certainly have a look.

Posted by Donald Schell | July 25, 2012 2:13 PM

This morning, I was grateful to see this contribution to the broad conversation about guns. It's art. Dance. Ready to engage our feelings, or better perhaps, a means of keeping our feelings and imagination engaged as we move beyond Aurora. Compassion fatigue and unconsciousness are killers too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDS16702DjE&feature=player_embedded

Posted by Donald Schell | July 25, 2012 2:21 PM

A bit more on the video clip. It's "shot of the day #4." There are three earlier ones and I expect more coming. Like Susan Russell's sermon making it to Huffington Post and re-posted here, it has some promise for keeping this conversation going. If we sustain (not this thread, but the big, national conversation), we might actually get our politicians to talk about these issues and think with us. As Ron Fox asserts above, facts belong in the conversation - personal stories like the ones I've told and lots of skeptically evaluated statistics.

Posted by Donald Schell | July 25, 2012 2:24 PM

I can see two immediate differences between automobiles and guns. First, keeping and bearing arms are a right, whereas keeping and using cars is a privilege. The government has far more legitimate power to regulate the latter than the former. Second, the right to self-defense is far more essential than the privilege of driving.

I don't blame you for being skeptical regarding that study. I was too when I first heard about it. I'm not at all surprised that you haven't heard about it. The MSM generally suppresses (by a failure to report) stories about the successful use of arms by law-abiding citizens to stop or prevent crime. But this is not a study funded or published by an advocacy group, it is a serious scholarly study published under the aegis of a major university.

I called you arrogant because you (and others in the anti-civil rights movement) write from a perspective that your viewpoint is obviously correct and common sense, and that those who oppose it are carrying the day because they are emotionally dominated by fear and readily manipulated by marketing campaigns. I cannot recall seeing any proponent of restricting civil rights with regards to guns consider any logic or intellectual arguments in the positions of gun civil rights supporters.

Posted by RonF | July 25, 2012 9:16 PM

I do not oppose any regulations regarding gun ownership or use. Age limits, criminal records, etc. are all properly considered. But the overriding premise of any such regulations MUST start from the basis that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens a) is the only Constitutionally valid position and b) have at minimum never been shown to make the public LESS safe. As clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence, the purpose of government is to preserve citizens' rights, not grant or restrict them.

The reason why you see so much mistrust of the advocates of gun civil rights restrictions is that historically they have done everything they can to prevent law-abiding citizens from owning and bearing guns of any kind, and to put all manner of barriers - both legal and bureaucratic - in the way of exercising what portion of those rights are still preserved. Many of them (e.g., Sen. Diane Feinstein) have announced that their goal is to get all guns out of civilian hands. So people tend to see regulations requiring training not as measures to ensure safety, etc. ( as, say, automobile licensing is seen) but as a back door to preventing people from having guns. There's a lot of reasons for the mistrust you see.

Here's an example. After Chicago's gun laws were struck down by the Supreme Court the City Council and Mayor hurriedly passed a new law. One portion of it was that all persons wishing to own a handgun in Chicago had to train at a gun range to get a permit. Another portion of it was a ban on gun ranges (except for training police) in the city. Does that sound like an effort to ensure safely trained gun owners to you? Or does it sound like a way to make it very difficult for people in Chicago to get gun licenses? Another portion of the law was to restrict handgun owners to having the gun only in their home and only unloaded. You literally cannot walk out the door of your house or even into an attached garage without breaking the law. Does this seem like an attempt to reasonably regulate gun use to you?

Again - if you want logic, reason and trust on the part of gun civil rights proponents, the gun civil rights opponents need to make the first move.

Posted by RonF | July 25, 2012 9:29 PM

Ah! I forgot to sign the last comment.

Posted by RonF | July 25, 2012 9:30 PM

I read the research article on the website you linked above. Reading it there, I was still amazed at the conclusion, "Guns save people from being crime victims anywhere from 800,000 to 2,300,000 times a year." You won't be surprised to hear that I remain skeptical, even reading the research model and the explanation of why other federally-funded studies so underestimate such an important phenomenon. I called a friend who has worked in criminal law for a good while. She also thought the number sounded inflated and took the study link and is going to ask around for research audit data. And I found this http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html , a series of articles purporting to explain what research error would produce such massive over-reporting of annual gun defense incidents. All of which is to say that you and I each remains skeptical of the other's facts, but I am trying to consider what you've offered and maintain the charitable and intellectually responsible possibility that your study may be quite. So continuing to look at this, waiting to hear more from my lawyer friend, and meaning to stay in conversation and listen across disagreement.

Posted by Donald Schell | July 27, 2012 8:27 PM

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