By Edwin Cooney
I guess it was inevitable in the wake of the disaster at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas last Sunday, November 5th…
Americans are many things. We’re the greatest democracy in the world. Since the early 20th Century we have led the world in creating the most ingenious technology. We’re an extremely generous people in that we respond to world disasters quickly and liberally. We possess socio/political empathy for the dispossessed all over the world. We’ve done more than any other people to attack disease and rebuild nations from natural disasters. Our good is almost, but not quite, flawless.
As I see it, our social and spiritual “achilles heel” lies in our tendency to solve too many of our problems by using death: legal death and institutional death.
Legal death is written into our statutes. There’s an incredible irony here. People who otherwise insist that they don’t trust government insist on empowering government to commit murder. That is legal death. Insofar as I’m concerned, by indulging in “legal death” government neither deters or prevents murder.
Then, there’s what I call cultural or institutional murder. That’s murder by expectation. Many believe that property rights are the basis of human rights. Thus, invasion of one’s property for many people is an invitation to the death of the intruder.
Since most of us are not murderers, we lack the mindset of a potential killer. I’m pretty much convinced that anyone who murders has given up entirely on both him or herself and, feeling pain and despair, is ready to inflict it on others. Furthermore, to understand the cause of murder should never be seen as a search for the legitimacy of murder. To prevent murder we must first comprehend what works and what doesn’t as we deal with it. In the meantime, there is no power that can prevent a murderer or mass murderer’s ugly and irresponsible act. I’m convinced that fear, even of death, is incapable of penetrating the rationality of a killer such as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock who first took the lives of 59 people before taking his own life. The tragic fact of life, especially here in the United States of America, is that we continue to try and master criminal killing with legal killing. Now, there’s a new twist to an institution that’s come into being that can only bring more tragedy.
What puzzles most people around the world according to an article by Max Fisher and Josh Keller in the November 8th New York Times is why there are so many murders in the United States. Fisher and Keller conclude by the end of their column that the cause of so much killing is the astronomical high degree of gun sales here in America. They point out that the U.S. population is only 4% of the world population but that Americans own 42% of all guns in the “whole wide world.” A comparison of the killings that take place in America, Canada and Britain is stark. Americans annually kill each other at a rate of 33 per million people. Canadians kill at an annual rate of 7 per million and the British kill at a rate of .07 people per million. Gun lovers insist that people, not guns, kill people and, of course, they’re right, but that misses the mark. Sadly, unlike the rest of the world, Americans see gun ownership as a right where most of the people throughout the western world see the baring of arms as an earned privilege. As I see it, there’s a distinct difference between exercising a right and taking advantage of a privilege. Those enjoying a privilege are invariably awed and perhaps a little humbled by that privilege. Those who exercise a right are very often “righteous” in their exercise of that right and even a little angry when that right is challenged.
Now for the first time (insofar as I’m aware), we have the institution of the “Pistol Packing Preacher.” The idea is that with more guns, there will be a higher degree of safety and security while we worship.
Thus, in this brave, defiant new “Trumpian world,” a clergy man or woman comes to the pulpit to assure parishioners of a peaceful eternity packing sufficient lead to induce an immediate start toward that journey. How about that, a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other!
When a society spends more money for guns than it does for charity, there is something outrageous about that society. To interrupt a killing is an heroic act worthy of the highest praise, but those who propose that a working clergyman or woman should see killing as being part of their spiritual obligation makes them automatically unworthy of their profession.
Probably somewhere in the thousands of western films produced by Hollywood there’s a scene depicting a preacher with a rifle, but it’s my guess that he’s hunting not preaching.
The very idea of a “Pistol Packing Preacher” is the height of misplaced religiosity. America didn’t become great on the religious wrath of revenge.
Righteous wrath, after all, was Marshall Dillon’s job!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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