Mom, Apple Pie, Baseball, Chevrolet, Smith and Wesson

          What could be more American than Mom, Apple Pie, Baseball, Chevrolet, Smith and Wesson?  We have strong sentiments about our mothers.  We have an appetite for homemade desserts cooling in the kitchen window (who does that anymore?).  Baseball has been the traditional All-American sport (now superseded in popularity by football).  Chevys have been an icon of Americana (“What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA!”).  And along with our love affair with the automobile a large portion of Americans have had an affection for guns.

            The Second Amendment to our Constitution protects our right to bear arms, and is as rooted in our history as the right of freedom of speech, and supported by one of the strongest lobbies in the country.  I have no problem with people owning guns.  I have family members who love to hunt.  While I am not among them I do benefit from a fair helping of venison stew every now and then.  Hunting is a reasonable activity it seems to me, satisfying a visceral human need, as well as helping to maintain population control among certain species of wildlife.

            Still, I have to wonder why any American citizen needs to have in his or her possession the kind of automatic assault weapons that were owned by Newtown, Connecticut resident, Nancy Lanza, and used by her mentally-ill son, Adam, to kill her and twenty-six other children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.   There is more gun violence in the US than in any other wealthy nation because we have the least restrictions on gun ownership than any other nation.  Ironically, Newtown is the location of the second largest gun-lobbying institution in the US, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

            There is a specious argument that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”  But as one of my colleagues has said, “you put enough guns out there, and somebody’s going to get hurt.”   

A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife. Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.*

            I expect that what happened at Newtown last week will not lead to the end of recreational gun ownership, or hunting, or anything of the sort, nor should it.  But I do hope we will finally have a reasonable limitation on the kinds of weapons that none but the military need in their possession.

            And lastly, writing as a Christian pastor, I have to wonder how any follower of Jesus could possibly justify a counter argument.            

*Quoted from http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-the-solution-to-gun-violence-is-clear/2012/12/19/110a6f82-4a15-11e2-b6f0-e851e741d196_story.html?hpid=z2