On Day 11 of Christmas--Pray For An End To US Gun Violence

He looked for a crop of justice,
     and saw them murdering each other.
He looked for a harvest of righteousness,
     and heard only the moans of victims.

Isaiah 5:7 (the Message)

It's hard to imagine the nation’s outrage if the mass killings that have occurred here over the past decades had been carried out by known members of terrorist organizations.

When it came to fighting terrorism after 9/11, Americans didn’t just throw up their hands in helplessness, but immediately went about creating a new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and empowered it to do whatever necessary to prevent future disasters of that kind. Many now believe that department has gone too far in creating restrictions and regulations limiting our freedoms and our rights to privacy, but most still support the nation’s response.

So why not more aggressive action to prevent the kinds of mass killings we've been witnessing?

I hear many pundits, politicians and even preachers simply express feelings of helplessness over this kind of carnage. Seeing it largely as the work of psychotic loners, they conclude that no amount of additional screening for gun or ammunition purchases--and no stricter laws limiting the kinds of weapons or the size of ammunition clips available--could help prevent these tragedies. It’s a moral and a mental health problem, they say, and the common wisdom is that neither morality nor sanity can be legislated.

While there is some truth to that notion, laws are not only intended to prevent harm but to make a statement about a society’s values. I can’t believe that supporting unlimited access to combat-style weapons (designed only to kill as efficiently as possible) is consistent with placing a high value on human life. And even if some semi-automatic assault weapons were approved for hunting, do they need to be equipped with a hundred rounds of ammunition?

I doubt that the framers of the Constitution had such means of massive destruction in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. I believe they would share our outrage over the fact that we are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun here in the US than in Japan, and 6 times more likely than in Germany, resulting in a total of over 12,000 such deaths here each year. And they would not attribute that to our being more violent or more deranged than citizens of other nations.

Please pray for an end to gun violence.

We have made a covenant with death,
And with Sheol we have an agreement;
When the overwhelming scourge passes through
it will not come to us;
For we have made lies our refuge,
And in falsehood we have taken shelter.

Isaiah 28:15