My wife and I stayed up late New Years Eve to watch the ball drop in Times Square and welcome in 2016. To stay awake, we watched a couple of episodes of a British cop show, Foyle’s War. The ball dropped on schedule, my wife and I kissed each other, we ate two chocolate cookies and went to bed. Elders live life in the fast lane.
On New Year’s Day we turned on the TV to see how our world had welcomed in the New Year. Our New Year was being welcomed in with a bang, lots of bangs as it turned out. Another mass shooting, and this time by an armed man in Tel Aviv. Two were killed, seven wounded.
More New Years news: A Texas law went into effect allowing licensed gun owners to carry guns openly in public at work, shopping or just going about their day. According to The New York Times, “members of the pro-gun Open Carry Texas were to gather at noon Friday one the south steps of the Capitol for a gun-on-their hips celebration before walking down Congress Avenue. One man, Mr. C.J. Grisham, the founder of Open Carry Texas in 203 planned to “carry two semiautomatic pistols at the Capitol rally.” He also gave his 13 year old-daughter a pink .22 caliber rifle for her birthday.
More news for the New Year: “students and faculty members at Texas universities will be allowed to carry concealed hand guns on campus.”
There’s one caveat in the Texas gun issue I find revealing: Texans carrying concealed or unconcealed weapons are prohibited in churches. They’re also prohibited at governmental and legislative meetings where, of course, laws like these are debated and finally enacted. What does this tell me? Texans are religious. They’re also nobody’s fool. They’re not about to have armed citizens in their midst while they’re deliberating controversial legislation involving guns. That would be putting themselves at risk, or like shooting themselves in the foot.
What in heavens name is really going on? What are people like this thinking? Why is gun ownership so important?
The white-hot passion and millions of dollars invested in lobbying to promote possession of combat type firearms seems to eclipse common sense, to oppose any reasonable constraints. Is what we’re seeing a reaction borne out of some sense of personal and social powerlessness or an unbridled appetite for control and domination?
What’s rarely discussed is what fuels the passion that so many have for owing guns. I don’t mean firearms for hunting and other legitimate recreational activities – guns for fun, if you will. I’m thinking of military weapons, killer automatic weapons whose design and purpose is primarily to kill as many bucks with one bang as possible, guns used regularly by armies to subdue or destroy an enemy.
I think that framing the gun debate as an issue of constitutional rights is hiding the wolf in sheep’s clothing, trying to legitimize an ugly aspect of our humanity by citing constitutional status. What’s at the heart of the matter is much more primal, coming more from the depths of the human heart where so many of our evils originate. For the angry and for those feeling helpless and slighted, or for those with an unquenchable appetite for power, the gun offers the quickest fix and the royal route to being someone with power, the man (typically men) to be reckoned with.
Someone with a camera caught the recent shooting in Tel Aviv as it was taking place. Once I got passed the initial horror I was witnessing, I saw something I’d often felt upon hearing horrors like this but I could never articulate before.
The scene captured by the camera reveals images of one man with a gun in his hand, waving it, almost triumphantly, as it spewed bullets into a café filled with innocent people who were there enjoying life. Imagine the scene and then think about how humiliating feeling powerless can be for anyone. And then think about all it takes to become powerful. One man or one woman with one gun, can intimidate, terrify, kill and subdue hundreds of people with whom they have grudges. There is no way that having a gun in hand didn’t impart to the man in Tel Aviv a sense of power of cosmic magnitude; the power over life and death, like God. For people feeling victimized, or entitled, power like that is an elixir.
The possession of weapons has become almost hallowed, as we learned recently at Liberty University, an institution that teaches, among other things, what Jesus would do. Following the mass shooting in San Bernardino, President Jerry Falwell Jr. encouraged students to own guns and carry them on campus. “I always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in . . . and kill them.” What happened to turning the other cheek and, I might add, visionary leadership?
We’ve been out of the caves and walking upright for about six million years. Have we learned anything yet? Then it was rocks and clubs. Next swords and staves and now it’s guns and bombs. Will we ever learn?
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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Julie Lowe says
Well said George. Thank you for the courage and the compassion to speak this peace. (Pun intended) I had not heard that quote from Jerry Falwell, but it confirms my feelings about him and other right-wing “Christians”. The second most important commandment Jesus gave us is to love your neighbor. This does not exclude the ones who are seemingly different from ones self.
Liz Freedlander says
George,
Well said.
+Joel Marcus Johnson, Anglican Bishop of The Chesapeake, Ret'd. says
The Johnson elders did much the same, to add that we ate pickled herring as the ball descended, the custom from my Swedes. The Rabbi and I each have observed quite incidentally one of the most angry and outspoken advocates for retaining The Talbot Boys statue carrying a rifle case around downtown Easton. But when did we ever, just once, see Superintendent Foyle with gun in hand? Happy new year.