Against the Stream

Of Gods and Guns

What follows is the text of the sermon I preached on February 18, 2018 at Edgebrook Community Church in Chicago, IL.

I venture to say that most preachers, if given a crystal ball and a chance to pick the days on which they were to preach, would select very carefully which days would be the “easiest” for them, the ones without controversy, without heartbreak, without tragedy. If you knew in advance what the world would throw at your Congregation, most preachers would strive to preach on what for lack of a better term we could call “quiet” weeks. Alas, I was not granted such a crystal ball, and so I find myself standing before you on this Sunday in the wake of another horror, another tragedy, and I am impelled to speak on it.

However, it is important, before doing so, to speak of who we are, what we as a community are here to do, and most particularly, what this time in the liturgical year signifies for us as a congregation, and more broadly as the people of Christ.

A lot of quips were made on Wednesday about the convergence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s day, including by me. It is a bit amusing, for certain values of “amusing” that a day dedicated in our culture to the celebration of a sort of indulgent form of romantic love — with chocolate, wine, flowers, and fancy dinners — converged with the beginning of the great fast of the Christian tradition. In the morning, when it was still possible to laugh, I posted to Facebook: “Welcome to your 40 days of fasting and self-denial. Here, have some chocolate.” And culturally speaking, Ash Wednesday was almost totally ignored in the flood of feel good valentine’s day stories. But as a Christian, even as I looked over those stories, I was aware of the fact that for me Ash Wednesday had to predominate. And so later on in the day I wrote: “Remember, you can’t spell “Valentine without Lent.” 

Other Christian friends of mine would post memes about how Saint Valentine was actually beaten and beheaded for the gospel so, you know, happy Valentine’s day! This is the equivalent of the memes I sometimes see around Christmas time pointing out that Saint Nicholas was known as much for punching heretics as he was for distributing gifts to children. It’s a good and worthwhile thing to deconstruct our cultural myths surrounding these holidays, and to remind ourselves of the degree to which Christian figures and symbols are so often culturally appropriated and misused for secular purposes. Catch me the Sunday after March 17th to hear all of my thoughts on Saint Patrick.

Yet there is an innate contradiction between the way we culturally celebrate the idea of Romantic Love on February 14th, and the reality that Ash Wednesday calls us to contemplate. As the ashes are imposed upon us and the celebrant intones “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” Romantic love is in a very real sense gnostic. Our modern conception of it is rooted in medieval traditions of courtly love, in which romantic desire was intended to be sublimated to higher pursuits like poetry, and where physical beauty was celebrated, but only as something not to be touched. Young courtiers would woo (usually) married women, but not with the intent of seducing them (in theory), but rather with the intent of simply celebrating their beauty through art.

Ash Wednesday, by contrast, calls on us to remember our total physicality, to remember that we are flesh, blood, and bone. That we are, in a real sense, dust. Dirt. That to be human is to come from humus — the ground. And that is where we are destined. Our beauty will fade, which the medieval courtiers chose not to reflect upon. Our bodies will fail us, and ultimately we will die. And we have constructed an entire culture around the desire to forget that fact. We idolize — in the real sense of idolatry — youth, physical prowess (just look at the Olympic), physical beauty, really everything physical except that which is the most salient fact of all about our physicality, that we are made of meat.

There is a science fiction story by Terry Bisson that reflects on this fact. It is simply a dialogue between two aliens who are considering whether to make first contact with humanity. They are taken up short, however, when they realize that we’re made of meat.

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

Once they realize the truth of the matter though, they opt to move on without making contact with us. After all, they reflect. Who wants to meet meat.

The story is funny because we don’t usually think of ourselves as meat. But we are in fact meat. All the way through. The first time that I taught this story in one of my classes, in order to get them to reflect on the reality of our own mortality as well as the sheer wonder of the fact that in Jesus Christ God became human, God became meat, for our sakes, one of my students shouted at me “Stop calling us meat!”

But meat we are, and meat we shall be. And what today’s Gospel story serves to remind us is that God did indeed become meat for us. Jesus Christ was God in flesh, God con carne, God in meat form. And that God became meat for us and for our salvation. And so while Valentine’s day tries to get us to forget that at the end of the day we are dust, we are matter, we are meat. The lesson of Ash Wednesday — and the entirety of Lent — pulls us in the opposite direction.

In today’s passage what we find is an all too human Jesus, impelled to John in order to be baptized. In Mark’s telling of the story we get few flourishes, unlike in Mathew and Luke. Jesus comes to be baptized, and rising out of the water has an experience of the Holy Spirit and hears a voice telling him that he is the Son of God. It’s striking that all of this is, in a way, subjective. Jesus sees and hears these things, but they are not, in a sense public declarations of Jesus messianic role. Unlike the other gospels, where an actual dove appears, and where a voice speaks to the crowed telling them that Jesus is the Son of God, here the only one who receives this message is Jesus, and it is he, not the crowd, who is addressed by the voice. This is not the moment of Jesus’ public ministry. Rather, this is the moment of Jesus own self-identification as the messiah.

And so he does what one might expect in the wake of such a revelation — he flees into the desert. Whether to get away from the reality of the revelation, or to reflect upon its meaning, or to seek some higher wisdom, the story does not report. Rather we are just told that the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. The Greek word which we translate here at Spirit is pneuma, which is the same root from which we get words like “pneumatic.” It can indicate both the concept of “breath” and the concept of “wind.” In Hebrew the word “ruach” serves the same function, indicating wind and breath as well as Spirit. So in a real sense we can say that Jesus is blown into the desert by the wind of God, and there we learn three things in Mark’s telling: He’s tempted by Satan, he’s “with the wild beasts,” and he is attended by angels. Given how little Mark gives us to work with, all three of these are evocative without actually being substantive. They give us food for our imaginations, but nothing by way of detail. We do not get the classic scene of Satan bringing Jesus to a mountain top and offering him all the kingdoms of the world if he will bow down before Satan. We’re only told that there was a temptation.

But then there is the idea that he was “among the wild beasts.” Often when we think of the fleshly aspects of our humanity, the non-spiritual, non-intellectual aspects of our existence — which is to say things like indulgence in food, indulgence in sex, indulgence in luxury of any kind — it is referred to as “beastial,” that which makes us more like animals. So one way to parse this is that Jesus comes to grip with the reality of his humanity — the fact that he is both God’s son and that he is made of meat. And yet in the end, he is “attended by angels,” which is to say, having rejected Satan’s temptations (whatever they were), and come to grips with his messianic identity as the all too human Son of God, Jesus is given comfort by the messengers of God.

However, the story continues, and crucially, it concludes on Jesus embrace of his ministry and his proclamation of the Gospel: The Kingdom of God has come near. The time is at hand. Turn around and here the good news!

The Sunday after a school shooting is a strange time to be talking about good news, of any sort. It would seem that the reality of the bad news that we have been grappling with since Wednesday should overwhelm the good news to which Jesus calls us to attend. How can we celebrate the Kingdom which has come near to us when it seems so far away? How can we lift up our voices in praise of God in the face of such radical evil? There is no easy answer to that question. But here are some things that I do know.

First, there is a sense in which this school shooting is a tragedy, but not in the way most people think. I am always wary when I hear the word tragedy used to describe these kinds of events. It suggests the idea that we are helpless before it, that we could have done nothing to prevent it. That it is the mere capriciousness of fate that put those children in the way of a maniac’s bullet. There is a way of telling this story in which it is a tragedy of that kind, and like the classical Greek tragedies, any attempts to avoid the preordained outcome only serve to hasten its arrival. Like Oedipus’s father seeking to evade the prophecy that he will be killed by his son, only to have his very acts lead to that very outcome. In this telling of the story we are passive in the face of an unavoidable destiny, and so all we can do is allow history to take its course and sweep us along with it. This, sadly, or rather infuriatingly, seems to be the path taken by many of our political leaders in the past few days. 

But there is another sense in which it is a genuine tragedy, which is in that to the degree that it was inevitable, it was so because of our own hubris, our own pride, and our own belief as a nation that we are in some sense special, unique, exceptional. It is precisely our own elevated sense of self-importance as a nation that leads us inevitably into this cul de sac again, and again, and again. We refuse to believe that we have anything to learn from other nations. We refuse to believe that we have anything as a nation to repent of. We refuse to forthrightly face our own history and its present effects and make amends because far, far too many of us, including our political leaders, believe we do not have to. It is this hubris that is what makes the repeated reality of these shootings genuinely tragic. The tragedy, however, is not simply that something terrible has happened to innocent children. The tragedy is not that it was inevitable. The tragedy was that it was eminently preventable but that we in our pride and self-concern refused to do anything.

Second, and relatedly, I know that these crimes are preventable. Far too often in the wake of these attacks we hear that “nothing could have been done to prevent this.” And of course, again lacking a crystal ball, I cannot say for certain whether stricter gun laws would have prevented this particular crime. But I can tell you with moral certainty that stricter gun laws would prevent many crimes. That there is common sense gun legislation that could have made it much, much harder for this young man, who was not even old enough to legally buy alcohol, who was barely old enough to join the military, to obtain a weapon capable of massacring 17 people, most of whom were children in cold blood, in a school.

When we hear rhetoric about the impossibility of preventing shootings of this kind, we should be outraged at the passivity and defeatism it represents. As though the lives of our children, of our friends and neighbors are precious enough for us to at least try! I’m reminded of the line from an episode of the Simpsons where a parent complains of the difficulty of disciplining his unruly son — “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.” This line perfectly encapsulates the attitude of our political leaders. Having tried nothing and found it to have been ineffective, they’ve concluded that these kinds of killings are simply something we must accept.

But I do not accept it, be cause it is unacceptable. It was unacceptable when it happened in Columbine, 19 years ago. It was unacceptable when it happened in Newtown, six years ago. It was unacceptable when it happened, at a concert rather than a school, in Las Vegas mere months ago, and it is unacceptable now. I don’t need to go into the details of the kinds of legislation that may be able to make a difference in preventing future shootings. That information is widely available and I encourage each of you to go and research it thoroughly. What I do know is that these crimes are preventable, and as a Christian community, we have an obligation to strive to work to prevent any such crime happening in the future.

Third, I know that there is a deep idolatry that lies at the heart of the American obsession with guns. I mean this in a strictly religious sense. We have displaced our faith in the God of Jesus Christ and sought security in Moloch, the destroyer. We have placed our faith in a God who does not full with life, but who brings only death, who calls for human sacrifice, and to whom we repeatedly offer up our children. Until we truly repent and turn away from this idolatry of gun worship, we will be incapable of seeking the kingdom which Christ preaches in our reading for today. Yet as a culture, we have once again appropriated Christian language and put it to the service of our own cultural obsession. In this case though, instead of glomming onto a Christian saint and using him to sell flowers and chocolate, we have taken the name of Jesus Christ himself, and laid that name over the idolatrous worship of the God of guns, the God of death.

This was vividly illustrated in last years TV adaptation of the book American Gods, in a scene in which Jesus, among a group of Mexican immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, is killed by a militia firing bullets with biblical slogans engraved on them. We mistake the gods of death and destruction, guns and bullets with the God of Christianity. But “mistake” is the wrong word. We do it intentionally, because the Gospel is a much harder path to follow than one that congratulates us as a nation for our own worst excesses. And so, we offer sacrifices to the God of guns. We offer our children.

However, Fourth, I also know this: The gods of death and destruction do not have the last word. Rather, in Jesus Christ we know that the Kingdom is in fact near. We know that death is overcome in the flood of new life. That we are in fact made for a destiny beyond the tawdry idolatries of Valentine’s day and the cult of guns. We know that the last word in the Christian lexicon is hope. And that our hope is not that we might escape our flesh, that we my transcends matter, that we might leave our bodies for a heavenly realm. Rather, our hope is that we may dwell within God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, in the flesh, not merely in the spirit, and that every bodily aspect of our lives can be and will be redeemed in the Kingdom that has come near to us. Near enough to us that we can almost see it, if we squint, and if we know where to look, and if we look, not to the violent and the defeated for signs of the kingdom, but to those who imagine a different world, a peaceful world, a world in which the violence to which we are subject has been overcome and love has come to reign among us.

And I know that we are currently wandering in the wilderness. That we are in the season where repentance is at the forefront of our consciousness. Along the way we may be tempted by Satan — tempted by indulgence, tempted by power, tempted by despair. But as we wander in the wilderness of Lenten reflection, we should remember in faith that our destiny is in the hands of one who desires not to sacrifice our children on behalf of a God of violence and warfare, but in the hands of a God who chose rather to sacrifice himself on our behalf. That this God intercedes for us in Jesus Christ, and that in Jesus Christ this God overcomes even the greatest of evils, even the most despicable of crimes. And let us remember in our lenten reflection that our history is not, ultimately, a tragedy, but rather a comedy — a divine comedy, in which the final act is the promise that we will dwell with God and in God’s kingdom forever.

Colorado Springs, San Bernardino, and Why We Keep Ending Up Here

Another day, another mass gun murder in the United States. Of course, we've been here before, many times. Each time, we arrive where we started, but, contrary to T. S. Eliot's poem, we continually fail to know the place for the first time. Rather, our positions get further entrenched, our arguments more vitriolic, nothing changes, and we simply await the next mass shooting.

In the case of the Colorado Springs shooting at Planned Parenthood, we know that the perpetrator was a right wing Christian anti-abortion activist (despite the shameful attempts of some politicians to pretend otherwise), while in the case of the San Bernardino shooting, it is increasingly apparent that the perpetrators were jihadists. In other cases, the shooters have been right wing racists (as in South Carolina), or deranged psychotics (as in Arizona, and Connecticut, and Boulder, etc., etc., etc.). The motives are not always clear, and for the ones who are legitimately crazy, the question of motivation may not really be all that relevant. But in the case of these last two shootings, it was clear that both sets of perpetrators were motivated by religious zealotry and violent fanaticism. In both cases, it's clear that they were acts of religio-political terrorism (although, it's interesting to note, that the FBI has quickly labeled the San Bernardino shooters -- Muslims, with Middle Eastern last names -- as terrorists, while they have yet to do so in the case of the white, Christian Colorado Springs shooter).

And, if we want to widen the lens a bit, we can include the regular acts of violence that take place around the United States that don't qualify as "mass shootings" but still demonstrate the exceptional rate of gun homicide in the United States -- Chicago, Baltimore, every major urban area, and the many less publicized examples that take place in predominantly white, rural areas. We can add to that the many, many examples of people who inadvertently mishandle legally owned firearms and accidentally kill people every day, up to and including toddlers who manage to get their hands on mom's gun and shoot her in the store. It is -- there is no better word for it -- madness.

Given the prevalence of this kind of violence in the United States, why is it that we keep winding up back here at the same place? Another act of gun violence, another mass shooting, and yet nothing is done. The easy answer is that the National Rifle Association as so corrupted American politics on this issue that we have become completely incapable of addressing it. But the issue is more complicated than that. The NRA is able to corrupt politics to the degree that it does because it has so many willing dupes in American gun culture who are totally and completely incapable of recognizing a) that guns are a genuine cause of massive harm in the United States, b) that there are policies that can be implemented to address that and c) those policies need not in any meaningful way impair their much-vaunted "right to bear arms."

Part of this, as an article at Vox points out, has to do with the ideological mindset of conservatives in the United States who see every act of gun violence, not as a reason to limit gun possession, but as a reason to expand it. This is the showdown at the OK Corral approach to gun regulation. They believe, apparently sincerely, that if only more people had, and openly carried their guns, shooters would be less likely to engage in gun violence. This is, the article notes deeply rooted in a particular psychological state that is impervious, or at least resistant, to counter-argument:

To our gun owner, another mass shooting is not an argument for getting rid of guns. It's a confirmation of his every instinct, another sign of moral and societal decay, another reason to arm himself and defend what he's got left.

You can tell him about Canada and Australia until you're blue in the face — the lower rate of gun deaths, the hunting exemptions, the seemingly intact freedoms. You can cite high popular support for restrictions on gun and ammunition sales. You can tell him that not every incremental tightening of standards is a slippery slope, that no one wants to confiscate his guns.

But you're just another self-righteous liberal on another self-righteous crusade, too blind or stupid to see how governments always use people like you to disarm their citizenry. You've taken enough — of his taxes, his freedoms, his culture. He won't give you any more.

So, incidents of gun violence become part and parcel of the argument that gun regulation itself doesn't work. This meme emerged quickly in the wake of San Bernardino, as at least one of my more pro-gun Facebook friends posted something suggesting that, since this happened in California, which has strict state-wide gun laws, this demonstrates that strict gun laws don't work. So the only alternative is to loosen gun restrictions so that everyone can carry all the guns they want, openly and in public if they so desire.

Of course, in the gang-ridden areas of Chicago, where I live, there are plenty of guns, and everyone knows who has them. Far from reducing gun violence there, it simply leads to the kind of in-group versus out-group violence that characterizes gang culture. Gun violence in this context begets more gun violence, and it's not clear what the way out of the cycle of violence might be except to break it entirely (an argument that Spike Lee is attempting to make in a novel Aristophanean way in his latest film Chi-Raq). The solution here is clearly not more guns. We've got plenty of guns. That's the problem.

 

At the same time, it's necessary to state as clearly as possible the response to these conservative objections to increased gun violence, not because it will change their minds (as the Vox article notes, there is already ample argument to change the mind of anyone who cares to pay attention, if their minds are genuinely open, but they aren't). It's important to state the response so that we are without excuse. So that it's clear that we know the difference between argument and obfuscation, and that we can tell the difference between the corrupted pseudo-argument of the pro-gun lobby and its willing dupes and the actual construction of sound public policy. And in that regard, there are a few things that bear repeating.

First, the goal of gun regulation is not and has never been to take guns away from people who want to use them peacefully for purposes of hunting, or even self-defense. Now, for my part, I think it's abjectly stupid to own a gun. I mean, it's really, really stupid, given that your gun is 17-times more likely to kill someone in your own household than it is to ever protect you from an intruder.* If it were legal to own a tiger, and if it were affordable to own a tiger, and if I had many friends who told me repeatedly that it was my right to own a tiger, and that in fact a tiger could protect me from my enemies, and that owning a tiger was incredibly fun and if only I owned one I would see how awesome and necessary tiger ownership was, I would still not wish to own a tiger, because it's quite clear to me that a tiger is vastly more likely to eat one of my children than it will ever be to protect them. Owning a tiger is stupid, even if you had a right to own one. That's how I feel about guns. Nevertheless, no one wants to pass laws that take guns from the hands of people who know how to use them responsibly (just like no one wants to take Siegfried and Roy's tigers, even after Roy got mauled by one of them).

The goal has never been confiscation, but regulation (and, after all, even a Second Amendment purist can't evade the fact that the phrase "well-regulated" is right there in the text of the Second Amendment). The goal is to keep guns away from those who shouldn't have them. However, the trend that I've noticed since the gun-control debate really re-emerged in earnest in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre is the personalization of the anti-gun control argument. At least, among the people I've been in conversation with, or who have placed anti-gun control memes on their Facebook pages, there is an intense sense that gun owners tout court are being blamed for gun violence. So what I read is a great deal of defensiveness. "I've never harmed anyone with my gun, so why do you want to take it from me?" Leaving aside the fact that no one wants to take their guns, the fact is that there is nothing personal about this. It's not about viewing gun-owners as a group as being morally suspect, it's about ensuring that a potentially dangerous item is secured from those who would abuse it.

Another analogy, similar to the tiger one above. Let's say I was a nuclear physicist. A good, moral, peaceful nuclear physicist, who worked with radioactive isotopes. Assume that I wanted to do an experiment that required access to plutonium. As it turns out, plutonium is incredibly difficult to acquire. And I can't help but think that's a good thing. It's not a moral accusation of me as a nuclear physicist that I have to go through massive background and security checks in order to acquire plutonium. On the contrary, it's a recognition that, no matter how moral I am, the possibility of harm from misuse of plutonium is  so great that even very moral people have to be very thoroughly screened in order to have access to it. It would be irresponsible if the Nuclear Regulatory Agency simply gave out plutonium to everyone who asked for it. Because it only takes one lunatic with a bit of plutonium to do enormous damage.

Even if I am a good, moral, and peaceful nuclear physicist, in fact especially if I am a good, moral, peaceful nuclear physicist, I should welcome that kind of scrutiny, not only because I don't want anything bad to happen through the misuse of plutonium, but because I recognize that if something bad did happen that as a nuclear physicist, I could be accused of culpability. In fact, if I were a nuclear physicist who lobbied strongly against the regulation of plutonium, I very arguably would be culpable if someone slipped through the very tattered regulatory safety net I had helped create. I think that this is  certainly true by extension of the gun lobby, and the NRA in particular, and I think it is arguably also true of the many gun owners who give them moral support through their money and their resistance to regulation.

However, there is still the matter of the argument that statewide gun regulations such as those in California are actually ineffective as a means of controlling gun violence. Again, I'm reminded of an Onion headline that encapsulates the substance of this argument quite well: "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens." If there were truly no way to prevent this kind of thing, then we'd see it happening all the time in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other modern industrialized countries. But we don't, at least not with the kind of regularity that it happens here. (Pointing to the recent attacks in Paris doesn't get you very far, since, horrid as they were, they were notable among other things for their rarity). So then, what is the response to people who point to ineffective gun laws?

The most direct answer is to agree: Gun laws of the kind we currently have are not effective, precisely because they only function on the state level. If the laws in California are strict, that's alright, because Nevada and Idaho aren't all that far away and the gun laws are much laxer there. Similarly, the very strict gun laws in Chicago are mocked given the degree of gun crime we experience. But anyone who is familiar with the city knows that it's the easiest thing on earth to get from Chicago to Indiana -- where the gun laws are much looser -- and back again in a couple of hours. State and local gun laws are ultimately ineffective precisely because they are not widely replicated in other states. Pro-gun advocates point to this as evidence that gun laws per se don't work. But this is simply fallacious: Poorly implemented local gun laws don't work, but a national law, which sought to both regulate guns at the point of purchase and also reduce the overall supply of guns available throughout the country, would be far more effective at controlling gun violence. The problem is one of easy availability. The solution is to make that availability much more difficult, both by increasing regulatory barriers (more and better background checks, longer waiting periods, etc.) and by decreasing the overall supply (through gun-buy back programs and requiring gun manufacturers and sellers to stop selling certain items, like extended magazines and armor piercing bullets). All by themselves these two policies (which would of course require a great deal more fleshing out than I can do here before they became law) would drastically reduce the possibility of gun violence, without severely restricting the rights of existing gun owners.

I would add another policy, which would undoubtedly be more controversial, but which shouldn't be: I would require a thorough psychological screening before anyone would be permitted to purchase a gun. To buy or possess a gun legally, you should be required to demonstrate to a competent professional that you are not a danger to yourself or others. It's been said repeatedly that the real problem of gun violence is largely a mental health problem. And while I don't think that's the entirety of the story, I am willing to concede that a non-trivial proportion of gun violence is perpetrated by people who are mentally ill. So, how to prevent it? Easily -- require all gun owners to undergo mental health screening. The goal here is not to stigmatize either gun owners or the mentally ill, but to recognize that some mentally ill people, given access to a gun, have the potential to use them violently, and the question must be how we keep the one from the other. Anyone want to take bets on how ready the NRA is to get behind this idea, despite their repeated claims that we should be concentrating on the mental health aspect of these attacks?

I could say a great deal more, but I'll leave it there for now. I will only add two things: First, I'm not claiming that this is an infallible path to the elimination of all gun crime. Certainly there will always bee the possibility that some gun crime will take place. But the goal is to reduce it to the degree that it becomes a rare and horrifying event, rather than the regular news item that it is now. Second, I have not yet addressed the other central aspect of these last two attacks, specifically the religious dimension. That conversation will have to wait for a subsequent post, which I hope to write in the next couple of days, time and jet lag permitting.

*Attempting to verify this statistic, I found studies suggesting anywhere from an 11-fold to a 43-fold increase in the likelihood of someone other than an intruder being killed by a firearm in the home. Difference in studies suggest different methodologies and data sets, but they all pain in the same direction: You are far more likely to see someone in your own home killed with your gun then you ever are to use it for protection. One of the best known studies suggests a factor as high as 43-times more likely.

Religion and Violence: Navy Yard Shooting Edition

Monday's Navy Yard shooting once again draws national attention to the problems that attend the easy access that we have to fire-arms in the United States. The solutions to that problem are elusive, both because it's not immediately apparent that most of the proposed means of limiting access to guns would be effective at achieving the end of keeping them out of the hands of those who would use them to harm, but also because, regardless of the merits of any particular solution, the gun lobby has such a lock on the political discourse around guns that it's impossible to get any kind of meaningful legislation through Congress. In the absence of sensible national legislation, any form of piecemeal state or local legislation is unlikely to be effective.

But the tragedy also raises troubling questions about the way that we talk about religion and violence in the United States for an unexpected reason: The shooter was a Buddhist.

As Joshua Eaton notes at Religion Dispatches, many people are rushing to draw exactly the opposite conclusion about Aaron Alexis's relationship to his religion from the one that is drawn when a crime is committed by a Muslim.

Notice how different things are for our Muslim neighbors. In the popular imagination, Buddhism is a religion of peace and Islam is one of war. We may wonder how a Buddhist could commit such an atrocity—despite Buddhism’s history of violence in places like Burma, Japan, Tibet and Sri Lanka [see: Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence, by Michael Jerryson in RD]. However, when the perpetrator is a Muslim we assume, as a matter of course, that religion was their primary motivation—despite the verses in the Qur’an that say murdering a single innocent person is the same as murdering all of humanity.

Of course, there is nothing to indicate that Alexis’ rampage had anything to do with his Buddhist practice. But even people who do commit atrocities in Buddhism’s name—the anti-Muslim monk Ashin Wirathu in Burma, whom Timemagazine called “the face of Buddhist terror,” may be the most famous example—often get the same treatment. Buddhists do not commit violence, it seems, therefore no one who commits violence can be a Buddhist.

To a large extent this public perception is rooted in the failure of most Americans to understand the complex relationship between corporate belief and individual action. As Eaton notes, there are examples of Buddhist violence for those who care to see it, and plenty of examples of Muslim peacemaking for those who want to acknowledge it. But once a perception of what a religion is gets locked into the public imagination, it can be very difficult to dislodge, and people will go to great lengths to preserve their preferred perception.

But religion can serve as a motive to both good and evil, as any ideological perspective can be. I am once again reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr's remark that religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. In the hands of a Dalai Lama or a Daniel Berrigan, religion can be an instrument for overcoming conflict through nonviolence. And in the hands of an Ashin Wirathu or a Jim Jones, religion can be an instrument of great evil.

All of which points to the amorphous nature of religious action. As a motive, it never points in only one direction, but depends entirely on the way in which it is understood by the receiver. This is a point that the neo-atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens always fail to recognize. The brutality of religious violence is rooted, not in the religion, but in the moral agent who uses religion as the motive to cause harm. Were we to live without religion of any kind, those inclined to violence would root their violence in some other ideology (as the Communist Party has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the world).

The question is whether those who believe in using religion for the sake of peace can make a compelling case for their alternative vision of religious truth. The evidence seems to be that Aaron Alexis was deeply mentally disturbed, and that his religion played no role in his pathologies, but even so, it is imperative that we be clear in any case where religion and violence are intertwined to attend to the agent and their actions. Religion in itself may or may not be a relevant vector for analysis, but one should assume that one knows all that is necessary about the agent and his motives once one knows what religion he was. 

Gun Control Studies

One of the perennial arguments that I've seen made by gun control opponants in my arguments about guns these past months is that gun control legislation won't, apparently a priori and by definition, work. Of course, there's actually a lot of data out there to the contrary, but how do you publicize it?

Well, that leads me to this post, and however many subsequent posts I can manage on this topic. Whenever possible, I will list one or more studies on the topic of firearms control that demonstrates, to a greater or lesser degree, the ways in which gun control is effective. I'll provide links to full texts whenever possible, but in a lot of cases I may only be able to provide links to abstracts. Either way, I invite readers to go and read the studies for themselves. Feel free to leave (civil!) responses in the comments.

First up then:

"The Effectiveness of Gun Control: Multivariate Statistical Analysis"

The purpose of this study is to statistically and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the gun control laws that have been adopted by states and municipalities. States are divided into two groups: states with no restrictions as to gun use and states with restrictions (e.g., waiting periods, license, etc.). Multiple linear regression models are used to evaluate the relationship between the number of gun related deaths in 1990 and sets of determinants which include state laws and regulations governing the use of firearms. The study results indicate that gun control laws have a very mild effect on the number of gun related deaths while socioeconomic variables such as a state's poverty level, unemployment rate and alcohol consumption, have significant impact on firearm related deaths. These findings suggest that any reduction in resources spent on social programs tied to the Crime Bill may be counter-productive.

"The Effectiveness of Legislation Controling Gun Usage: A Holistic Measure of Gun Control Legislation"

Results from past research on the effectiveness of gun control legislation have been mixed. This study posits that one of the reasons for these conflicting results is the use of individual laws as the major variable. Instead, this study uses a holistic and comprehensive measure of state gun control laws, grouping states into extreme and lax gun control states. A multivariate linear regression analysis is used to investigate the relationship between a set of determinants, including the holistic gun control measure, and firearm deaths per 100,000 inhabitants of each state. The results show that comprehensive gun control legislation indeed lowers the number of gun-related deaths anywhere between one to almost six per 100,000 individuals in those states that have the most extreme gun-related legislation. Our study also reveals that socioeconomic and law enforcement factors play equally important roles in containing gun-related fatalities. These findings suggest that gun-related deaths have a variety of causes and that attempts to legislate a solution to this problem will need to be correspondingly complex and multifaceted.

Comment:

These are the first two peer-reviewed studies I was able to find on a quick search of the issue. I intend to continue digging and post what I find here. But what these studies indicate is that a) gun control legislation is effective, but it is clearly not a panacea. Other social factors enter into the equation and must be dealt with alongside reasonable gun-control legislation.

Far from supporting the contention that gun control laws are ineffective then, then evidence seems to suggest that they do exactly what they are intended to do: Reduce firearm injuries and deaths. But by themselves, they won't result in massive overall improvements. That leads me to conclude that legislation is necessary, but is only part of the larger puzzle of solving the problem of gun-related violence.

As I find peer-reviewed studies that pertain to the issue, I'll post them here, along with any studies that offer a dissenting point of view. Again, feel free to offer civil commentary, including links to peer reviewed studies that offer the other side of the argument.