Gun Violence--Our Out-Of-Control Cancer

I'm weary of hearing nothing can be done about gun deaths.

"A well regulated tobacco industry being necessary to the prosperity of a free State, the right of the people to grow and use nicotine products shall not be infringed."
**************

If an Amendment such as this had become a part of our Constitution we would be having some serious debate over how we should define or defend it. But hopefully, we wouldn't just throw up our hands and avoid doing whatever possible to limit deaths from cigarettes and other nicotine products.

I propose an all out war on gun violence that would resemble the one we have been successfully waging on cancer.

Here are some parallels:

Cancer is a major cause of deaths among adults and children alike, as is gun violence. No one is safe from either threat, and no one knows all of its causes nor all the different forms these two killer problems can take. We recognize that no groups or individuals are immune from their harms or free of blame for contributing to them. There are no simple answers, no easy cures.

Since cancer is a complex disease which takes many forms, most reasonable people agree that ongoing research is needed over whatever time necessary in order to reduce cancer deaths and produce cancer cures. In the case of gun violence, Congress, under intense and ongoing pressure from the NRA, has actually withheld funds for such research.

In the case of deaths by cancer, we would consider it inadequate and inappropriate for legislators refusing to fund research or work at solutions to simply offer condolences to victims, as in, "You are in our thoughts and prayers."

Just because we can't pinpoint all of the reasons for deaths from cancer we don't throw up our hands and assume nothing can be done. As with any killer disease, we know some of what we need to know already, but recognize much more needs to be learned, and we are willing to join hands with people everywhere in search of a way to save as many lives as possible.

If one "shoe bomber" was given three life sentences and the rest of have had to take off our shoes at airports ever since, we can likewise commit to "regulating" the use of all explosive devices in the interest of saving lives, whether musket loaders (as allowed by the founders), hand grenades, shoes packed with gun powder, or other far more deadly weapons.

Tackling gun violence in these ways should never be seen as a left or right, liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican issue. This is about saving the lives of men, women and children everywhere. In the near term, we won't be able to save everyone, but pro-lifers everywhere must do everything possible to preserve as many human lives as possible.

Here are some links to other posts on the subject:
http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=gun+violence

Will Our County Support Militias To Defend Against Any Changes In Virginia Gun Laws?

Let's not even think about starting down this road.

At Wednesday's public hearing at Spotswood High School our community will consider whether our County should be declared a "Second Amendment Sanctuary." I also expect a second issue to be raised, that of supporting the establishment of a local militia such as Tazewell County has recently done.

Both actions concern me, and either could lead to a form of de facto secession from the rest of the Old Dominion, especially from the "North" (as in our northern Virginia counties) seen by many as left-leaning citizens bent on giving government more control of people's lives. A number of my ex-Mennonite and other good friends are all in favor of having even more citizens armed, and insist this would only be for purposes of protection and "deterrence."

But what if threats of force by militias failed to "deter" and we had a tragedy like that of the Davidian compound in Waco, Texas? Or what if a militia were to mount an attack on a state or federal facility in revenge for a perceived wrong as did the South Carolina state militia on Fort Sumter in 1861?

I know that may sound like an alarmist overreaction on my part, but militias are formed not for the purposes of negotiation or problem solving, not to work at mature constitutionally informed ways of bringing about fair and just outcomes, but to actually prepare to use armed force--or at least threaten to do so. And I tremble to think of what we might unleash as far as other groups, like neo-Nazi or white supremacist organizations, Black Panthers, the KKK, or communist cells following suit and establishing their own armed militias. Are we in danger of opening Pandora's Box?

So before the Board of Supervisors takes any action, could we at least allow for some needed time to have a blue ribbon commission of representative local citizens come up with a set of reasonable proposals that could bring us all together for the common good? Couldn't we get input from all interested citizen stakeholders to come up with a response that could be a good example for all Virginians to follow?

Meanwhile, I contend that any current proposed bills on gun legislation didn't just result  from northern Virginia liberals wanting to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. Rather, they are the result of grieving family members and friends and concerned citizens in general desperately wanting something done to end as much of the carnage as possible associated with events at Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Pensacola, Charleston, Parkland and other places too numerous to mention. Without those horrific disasters, there would be no discussions of the kind we are now having. None.

So gun owners need to make the case that the problem of gun violence has nothing to do with the ease with which people can access firearms, or that this is only a mental health problem (though as a mental health professional I see no reason to believe that US citizens have more serious mental health issues than other countries that have far, far lower rates of gun deaths).

And those who favor more restrictions on access to guns need to make the case that those kinds of restrictions actually contribute to the common good, and are not in violation of the Second Amendment.

Together we can find a responsible way forward.

Here are some more posts on gun violence https://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=gun+violence

What Weapon Would Jesus Approve?

Ancient sword

  

1795 Springfield rifle

Modern Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle

 

"Put away your sword, 

for those who take up the sword 

will perish by the sword."        

(Matthew 26:52)

"The fairest weapon in the land

 is the plow in the farmer's hand."  

(old Anabaptist saying)

One tongue-in-cheek proposal I ran across recently to help curb the growing epidemic of gun violence is to allow ownership of only the kinds of weapons the founders had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. This should please those who favor the strictest possible interpretation of the Constitution as well as help satisfy those who want guns for hunting and self defense.

Seriously, it is doubtful that the founding fathers ever meant for ordinary citizens to bear semi-automatic Bushmasters with clips containing 100 rounds of ammunition. There just is no way they could have anticipated today’s super efficient killing machines, nor could they have imagined the nation ever earning the distinction of having the highest murder rate of any industrialized (not to be confused with civilized) nation in the world.

 As it turns out, the US also has the highest total number of guns of any nation, a total of 310 million, which represents half the total number of guns in existence, owned by just 5% of the world’s population. This is more than enough to arm every able bodied American from fledgling first graders to aging grandmothers.

Meanwhile, while US crime rates have gone down, crimes committed with guns have increased, resulting in 32,000 deaths and 100,000 gun-related injuries a year (including suicides). If this trend continues there will more deaths from gun shots by the year 2015 than from automobile accidents. And there would be far more fatalities yet if it weren’t for the fact that medical professionals have become ever better at treating the wounded.

ABC News website

According to data compiled by the United Nations, the United States has four times as many gun-related homicides per capita as do Turkey and Switzerland, which are tied for third. And the U.S. gun murder rate is about 20 times the average of the other G-8 countries on the chart above. That means that Americans are 20 times as likely to be killed by a gun than in these other developed countries.

In spite of this, just a week ago the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre issued the organization’s first public statement since the Newtown shooting, railing against schools being designated as gun-free zones, and insisting that having even more guns, including in schools, is the answer.

While LaPierre was speaking, and while still more residents of Newtown were burying their dead, there was another multiple shooting going on in Blair County, Pennsylvania. That tragedy involved a handgun shooting of two men and a woman (the latter in a church). The shooter then injured three patrol officers before turning the gun on himself.

When it comes to reducing such tragedies, I know there are numerous problems that need to be addressed besides regulating guns, but all too easy access to all too many firearms loaded with far too much ammunition is surely a major part of the problem.

As to armed civilians helping stop armed killers, according to Mother Jones Magazine, in the 62 mass-murder cases over the past 30 years, not one was stopped by an armed civilian. A sheriff’s deputy at Columbine High School in 1999 fired at one of the two killers while 11 of their 13 victims were still alive. He missed four times.

There are no easy answers, but we must do something to stem our epidemic of gun violence.

See also, http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=the+right+to+bear+cars
and local musician Doug Hendron's latest song, "Too Many Guns"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC574hNwLnc&feature=youtu.be

Ruth Jost: We Must Balance Our Right to Guns With The Right To Life

We were a definite minority in this sometimes raucous crowd (photo by Jonathan Murch)

The following statement by Ruth Stoltzfus Jost at Wednesday's hearing by the County Board of Supervisors (on Rockingham County becoming a "Second Amendment Sanctuary") was repeatedly interrupted by boos and jeers from a crowd of some 3000 present. I post it here with her kind permission:

I'm Ruth Jost, a law-abiding gun owner from west Rockingham County. 

I appreciated the lawful use of a gun six days ago when I looked out my window and saw a beautiful 8-point buck that had been injured, thrashing and writhing in the pasture. It took exactly one shot from my neighbor's .257 bolt-action rifle to put it down (And yes, we're going to freeze and can that venison!).

This resolution was written to support my gun rights.  But the most important constitutional right our state and federal governments are bound to protect is the right to life itself. The resolution seems to misunderstand the balance of our right to guns with the right to life --which we protect through gun safety legislation.  

Preventing misuse of guns is the best way to protect their ownership and proper use. In fact, our gun rights are safe so long as gun safety is right. 

Some years ago as a lawyer I represented a woman in a custody dispute here in Harrisonburg. She testified that her husband drove by the house with his gun as she was standing in the front doorway holding their child. He fired at her.The bullet missed and went into the door frame beside her head.

When the judge ruled against this man on the custody of their child he exploded. He ran out of the courtroom to get his gun and his family ran after him. I don't know to this day whether it was his family or an officer who reached him in time. I, like my client and everybody else in the courtroom, was crouching below the windows until we thought enough time had passed. Chances are that in following days my client, like many thousands of women terrorized by domestic violence, had to lay low, go into hiding, or move away. 

If Virginia had had a red flag law then and a court had found that this man who shot at the heads of his wife and child was a violent person his firearm would have been temporarily taken and he would not have had his gun in the car that day. It is no surprise that this law has broad support, including among gun owners: a law abiding person recognizes that this law can protect that most important right: the right to life.

We all know gun rights aren't absolute and the Supreme Court has held they can be limited for legitimate safety concerns. 

Yet the language of this resolution appears to assume that any new gun safety law will be unconstitutional and implies that local officials will determine that and refuse to enforce it.

Does that mean that in a case like the one I described our law enforcement officials may decline to remove a firearm from a person determined by a judge to be violent? I do not want our county or our officers to risk being held liable for harm based on a misunderstanding that this resolution creates.

Our courts, not local officials, determine the constitutionality of our laws. I am confident our officials will enforce the law in the future as they have in the past. This document should be tabled and revised to reflect a balanced approach to the importance of gun safety.

December 11, 2019

For a constitutional scholar's take on the Second Amendment:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/second-amendment-text-context/555101/

For a mother's account of the meeting, with a response her young son prepared for the Board of Supervisors, see: 
https://www.jennifermurch.com/2019/12/second-amendment-sanctuary.html?fbclid=IwAR2iEPHXK2Ye3iczkEHiI1Li6TIh7sv_40HdPFmItyr5lZpn4OuY0xpMshc#comment-form

Gundamentalism Author To Speak At Sunnyside

Here's an invitation by speaker and author Jim Atwood to a presentation he's making at the Sunnyside Retirement Community east of Harrisonburg Tuesday, April 18, in his own words:

I have been involved in gun violence prevention for 42 years. It has been sad to watch thousands of Americans die unnecessarily by firearms over these years. For example, in our war in Iraq, 4500 service men and women were killed. In the same time frame 220,500 Americans were killed on our own streets and homes. They have died because our leaders feel "freedom" and so called "gun rights" are endangered by common sense regulations on guns. As a gun owner and Presbyterian minister myself, I reject such simplistic assumptions.

According to research by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, most gun owners, even NRA members, agree with me. My second book Gundamentalism and Where It is Taking America addresses the excessive religious and ideological stances of a small but powerful minority of gun owners I call "gundamentalists" who are supported by the corporate gun lobby, They abhor any attempted regulation or restriction on firearms, thinking that it will only lead to the confiscation of their guns. 

I'll be leading a presentation on Gundamentalism and Where It is Taking America at the Bethesda Theater (at Sunnyside Retirement Home) on April 18th at 9:45 a.m. I hope you will be there and bring a friend. I continue to believe as I have for 42 years that gun violence is America's greatest spiritual, ethical and moral problem.

- James E. Atwood

Local Forum on Reducing Gun Violence!

A public forum to address ways to reduce gun violence will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 6 at the Harrisonburg City Council Chambers  on 409 South Main Street. 
 

Tim Ruebke of the Fairfield Center will serve as moderator for the forum, which will be sponsored by the local chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (www.forusa.org). 

Panelists will include the following:

Former board member of Virginians Against Handgun Violence Ben Fordney summarizing national issues and President Obama’s proposals.

Marcia Garst or a representative from the Harrisonburg/Rockingham County Commonwealth Attorney’s office discussing local issues and public policy.

City Council member and attorney Richard Baugh addressing Constitutional and other legal concerns. 

Dwayne Martin, a former Harrisonburg Police Department officer and current Crossroads Counseling Center Mental Health Support Coordinator, relating experiences from both law enforcement and mental health perspectives.

Retired English professor Robin McNallie, examining myths and misperceptions on gun issues.

Admission is free to all, with audience comments and questions welcomed.

MCC on the NRA Enemy List

Folks at the Mennonite Central Committee, a world relief and development agency based in Akron, Pennsylvania, were surprised recently by seeing a Mother Jones article listing them as one of 140 organizations the National Rifle Association considers a threat to their defense of Second Amendment rights.

As someone who grew up in a rural Mennonite and Amish community where guns were used regularly for hunting, butchering and "varmint" control, I was mildly amused. According to an article by Kelli Yoder in the February 18 Mennonite World Review, the NRA had apparently carried the MCC name over from an earlier list it had compiled in 2003.

For purposes of comparison, MCC describes itself as a worldwide ministry of Anabaptist/Mennonite  churches that "shares God's love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice. MCC envisions communities worldwide in right relationship with God, one another and creation."

It has an annual budget of some $50 million.

The NRA, which supposedly promotes gun rights and gun safety, but mainly focuses on resisting any regulation of firearms whatever, has a budget of nearly five times that amount, none of which is invested in helping the needy.

It's true that East Coast MCC did support a modest gun violence prevention and education tour last year, but its impact was miniscule, I'm sure, compared to the contrary efforts of the NRA to fight all forms of gun control legislation.

This in spite of the fact that even President Reagan, in 1989, said, “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen [to own guns] for sporting, for hunting, and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47 or a machine gun are not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home."

In a recent issue of the Mennonite World Review, columnist Ryan Rodrick Beiler points out that "Israeli law restricts private gun ownership more than the NRA could likely stomach: long waits, training requirements, mental and physical health checks and shooting exams — all for only one pistol and a lifetime supply of 50 bullets and a permit requiring renewal every three years. Most guns therefore are carried by Israeli soldiers and the few civilians, as The Jerusalem Post reports, 'where the state has an interest in them being armed'.”

Even the most reasonable restrictions may be impossible to pass in today's NRA dominated political climate. The organization is heavily funded by gun manufacturers who are working harder than ever to improve their bottom line, and have the lobbying power to influence politicians accordingly. After all, guns tend to last a long time, so gun makers and marketers have to keep raising new fears and inventing new reasons why we should all buy more of their deadly products.

The NRA has become a well funded tool for promoting this kind of paranoia. I'm glad their MCC "enemy" has a message more more in keeping with that of Jesus, who said, "Put your weapon away. Those who take up the sword will die by the sword."

Here's an interesting link to some analysis by Rachel Maddow.

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

A Second Opinion On The Second Amendment

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security
 of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed."
(Facebook photo, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie)

I'm not a constitutional scholar, but as a pastor, counselor, grandparent and concerned citizen, I am praying we can all work together to curb gun violence.

I'm sure the founding fathers never imagined the Second Amendment would be used as a justification for the proliferation of gun sales to the extent that the US now has many more guns than it has children. Nor did they envision our being traumatized by far more gun deaths per capita than any comparable nation on earth, with a total of over 270 mass shootings in 2022 alone. We have nearly four times the number of gun deaths (homicides, suicides and accidental) per capita than in nearby Canada, which has stricter gun laws and only around 12 firearms per 100 inhabitants compared to our over 120 per 100 people. 

Yet our two countries have similar rates of mental illnesses, are exposed to the same kinds of rap music, violent video games and other forms of entertainment, and experience similar kinds of family dysfunctions. And we have an even higher percentage of people professing to be pro-life Christians, which should make us less violent, not more so. 

Of course guns do not cause killing, but they do enable killers to be much more efficient in the number of horrific deaths and unimaginable injuries they can inflict in a short period of time. And while the framers would agree that if someone harms another with a lethal weapon, it is the person and not the object that bears the blame, I believe they would still choose to limit access to weapons repeatedly used to cause massive harm.

Besides any assumed need of guns for hunting purposes or for self defense (reasons not explicitly stated in the Constitution) the second amendment does clearly provide for "well regulated militia" organized by the states but under the ultimate authority of the president. Article I, Section 8, states one of the duties of Congress as "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress..." Article II, Section 2, further states:  "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States..." 

“Militia” almost certainly means organized groups operating under clearly defined authority, not vigilantes organized and armed for the purpose of overthrowing their government. That's why the founders provided for elections, to bring about orderly changes in national policies and politicians as spelled out in the Constitution. Article 1, section 8 makes it clear that one of the duties of the Congress is"To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions..."  In other words, insurrections are to be suppressed by authorized militia, not initiated by them.

Finally, we have no way of knowing whether the framers of the Constitution would have written the Second Amendment differently had they known the kinds of unimaginably deadly weapons that are freely available today, even to those deemed too young to buy their own beer. As intelligent people concerned for the general welfare of the people, they would surely have engaged in the same kinds of serious gun debates we have today, resulting in our currently having laws that limit the right of civilians to bear arms like grenades, cannons, weaponized drones, Javelins or fully automatic military style weapons. 

Of course no one knows where the founding fathers would have drawn the line, but they clearly intended to create a framework in which differences of opinions and policies could be worked out in a peaceful way. Since the carnage caused by today's unbelievably high powered and rapid firing weapons is so much greater than the musket loaders used in their day, they would surely have encouraged our giving serious attention to what should or should not be permitted.

I'm sure we can all agree that children should never have to fear being massacred at school or, as survivors, have to carry scars of physical and emotional trauma for the rest of their lives. May God help us end the all too familiar kinds of domestic terrorism that are causing irreparable harm to our children and to all of us.

New Gun Law For Nelson, Georgia

Members of the City Council of Nelson, Georgia (population 1,324) recently passed a so-called "Family Protection Ordinance" by a vote of 5 to 0. According to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it requires each household in Nelson to be equipped with a gun and a supply of ammunition.

This suburban area just north of Atlanta hasn't actually had a violent crime in the past ten years, but its good, church-going city elders thought it should make a statement about gun rights and the need of citizens to be prepared just the same.

Oddly enough, there are no actual penalties if the town's citizens don't comply. Anyone can opt out, and there are special exemptions for felons and people who are mentally unstable, so one wonders about the point of this new law. One Council member described as the equivalent of "a security sign for our city."

It seems that not only are many Americans "clinging to their guns and their religion," as President Obama once inelegantly stated, but that guns have to represent a form of religion in itself, one with the motto, "In Guns We Trust." NRA evangelists are promising all of us a kind of sure salvation they assure us only arms and ammunition can provide.

Meanwhile guns are involved in the murders of an average of 32 men, women, and children every day in the US, plus in far, far too many suicides and gun-related accidents.

Incidentally, the Brady Center has just filed a lawsuit against the City of Nelson, alleging that its new ordinance violates citizens’ First, Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights. According to the Center spokesperson, "A gun should never be forced on anyone who chooses not to own one."

You can put me down as one of those.

If Your Wife Was Being Threatened By An Armed Attacker, Should You Use A Gun To Protect Her?

I can't verify the math in this graphic, but here's a link to the source. 

One of my gun-advocating friends recently asked me whether I would use armed force to defend my wife if she were being attacked.

According to the numbers above, perhaps I can take comfort in the fact that in the US, at least, most of us have only a 0.0000085641025264% chance of being killed by someone with a gun in a given year. I'm not much of a mathematician, but doesn't that put my wife and me at far less risk of being shot than our being struck by lightning?

So based on the logic of the statistics cited, I'm puzzled by those who feel I should buy an AR-15 or two to defend myself and my family.

This doesn't mean I would just stand passively by if someone dared to inflict harm on a friend or a member of my family--or even a stranger, for that matter. In fact, in the desperate and adrenaline-driven passion of the moment I might find myself inflicting serious injury or suffering grave personal injury or death in an effort to prevent someone from doing violence to another, and especially if it were my wife or another family member (though in fact none of knows exactly how we would respond).

Or in the case of a terrorist attack in a public place, if I as a civilian (rather than a uniformed and trained police officer) were to brandish a gun, I would far more likely add to the carnage and chaos going on, to say nothing of my risk being shot by any official first responder aiming to take out any shooter in the area. So I would likely do what even most concealed carry gun toters have done in such circumstances, run for cover.

At any rate, the above are not the kind of extremely rare scenarios that will determine whether I arm and train myself to use deadly force. I grew up on a farm where guns were considered necessary for butchering, hunting and getting rid of varmints. For me that's not necessarily a problem (though having any gun around is always a safety risk, especially with children around). But purchasing a firearm and keeping it loaded for the sole purpose of killing or maiming someone is something I refuse to do as a follower of Jesus.

Meanwhile, I will not hesitate to keep my doors locked as appropriate, and will immediately dial 911 if I suspect an intruder might be about to cause harm to me or to anyone else. That's what I believe the God-ordained institution of civil authority is instituted to do (see Romans 13), to protect the innocent and to bring violent people to justice. Some kind of "well-regulated militia" or a well trained and disciplined police force may always be necessary as long as a majority of citizens are not living by the higher law of love for God and for their fellow human beings.
http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/2016/01/elections-vs-insurrections-is-second.html

Having said that, the use of military force, especially on foreign soil, is in my mind quite another matter. Here the primary aim is to inflict death and destruction, and to intimidate, threaten and/or conquer an alleged enemy by whatever means possible.
http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-christians-should-still-refuse-to.html

What are your thoughts?

My Big Cost Saving Proposal For The Pentagon

Why do we arm service men and women 
with $700 rifles?

Background: From a recent reading of the Pulitzer prize-winning Politifact site I learned that since 1968 "more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country's history." According to their findings, about 1.4 million firearm deaths have occurred in the past 50 years compared to 1.2 million U.S. fatalities in war. The number of gunfire deaths does include suicides, but it's sobering to think of the huge homicide rate in our country.

But guns are far from being the only murder weapons involved in these phenomenal numbers. According to the same Politifact site, there are even more Americans killed each year with knives, by physical assault, or with clubs, baseball bats and hammers than there are with rifles. Of course, when you add handguns to the mix, that dramatically changes the equation, since pistols are the weapon of choice for most one-on-one murders.

In the wake of the latest horrific school shooting, I've heard some of the above statistics being used to downplay the idea that limiting access to semi-automatic rifles would substantially reduce fatalities in our country.

Which leads me to a simple question.

If such weapons as AR15's, especially when equipped with large magazines, aren't a significant factor adding to our nation's overall civilian kill rate--or increasing the number of school children being maimed and slaughtered--why not rethink how we train and arm members of our military, to whom we issue very similar (though fully automatic) weapons?

Just think of all the tax money we could save if we sent soldiers to battle armed with baseball bats and hammers instead? Or given the fact that more people die as a result of auto accidents than from gun murders, why not just give them vehicles to crash into enemy lines?

We don't do so for one simple reason. They are not as efficient at killing the largest numbers of people possible in the shortest amount of time possible.

Here's a link to a piece on the urgency of funding more research on this topic. 
https://harvyoder.blogspot.com/2017/11/gun-violence-out-of-control-cancer.html

Has God Forsaken Our Public Schools?

Photo by MercuryNews.com

Just hours after the massacre of innocent children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mike Huckabee, one of the few Fox News commentators I sometimes listen to, stated, “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be surprised that schools become a place of carnage?"

I wanted to ask how he explained the tragic murders of devout and innocent Amish children in the 2006 Nickel Mine School shooting. Had they removed God from their school? I don't think so. At any rate, unlike some of Huckabee’s faith-related observations, I reject the above on many grounds:

1. A compassionate God who observes each sparrow’s fall--and who is outraged by innocent people suffering for any reason--will never allow himself to be removed from any place on the planet.

2. God is certainly present wherever there are loving parents who daily send their children to school with their prayers and blessings. But God also inhabits shopping malls, parks, hospitals, work places, and even places of worship ;-), regardless of what religious activities may (or may not) be going on there.

3. My experience with the bland prayers and readings I was exposed to in public school (where virtually all students were from Protestant Christian homes) was extremely minimal compared to the influence of my family and congregational family, along with some of the good role models I had in many of my elementary teachers.

4. One doesn't have to be smarter than a fifth-grader to realize that public schools today represent a much more religiously diverse population than when I attended, and that it would be almost impossible today to devise prayers for all that would not be offensive to some, including myself.

5. While we would love to have our grandchildren be able to attend one of the good Christian schools in our area, our two local grandstudents have been blessed with exceptionally dedicated (some Mennonite) teachers in the dual Spanish/English program they are enrolled in at the Smithland Elementary School. God is obviously present in many of these teachers' lives, and we pray for them and for our grandchildren every day.

Meanwhile, our fervent prayer is that we all utilize every possible moral, spiritual, medical and/or legislative way possible to stop this kind of carnage. If we don’t, deaths in the US resulting from gun violence will begin to surpass those caused by automobile accidents.

We can't afford to let that trend continue.

See also http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=the+right+to+bear+cars

Do We Need a Department of Homeland Safety and Sanity?

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)

Can you imagine the nation’s outrage if the crescendo of killings that have occurred in places like Columbine High, Virginia Tech, Phoenix, Arizona, and Aurora, Colorado--and as of today, Oak Creek Wisconsin--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 Colorado style killings?

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 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.

Maybe we need a “Department of Homeland Safety and Sanity” that would be charged with addressing the above issues, along with finding better ways of detecting (and treating) psycho-terrorists before they engage in their senseless slaughter. This agency might also want to look at the issue of excessively graphic violence in media entertainment, such as in the movie "The Dark Knight Rises" being shown on the night of the Aurora horror.

Adam Gopnik recently wrote in The New Yorker, “The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be.”

Gopnik isn’t advocating outright censorship, but is appealing for a major shift in our attitudes toward this kind of entertainment, and believes the cost of movie violence has simply become too high.

He writes, “The problem... when we talk about these things is that we want causality. And culture doesn’t give us causality. But there’s connectivity without causality. ... The connectivity of a culture is a deep thing.”

He notes how the horrors of 9/11 are “eerily similar to the destruction in big-budget disaster movies,” and asks, “Is it incumbent on us always to pretend that we just love watching scenes of massacre and mass destruction? ...It’s only when [disaster] actually happens that you realize what its actual content is... that kind schizophrenic divorce between the actual content and the imagined content of our lives becomes uglier and uglier as I get older.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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

For some related thoughts you may want to check out my 7/21/12 and 1/16/11 posts.

Some Questions for Attorney General Candidates

This is a sample of questions I've sent to the two area Republican candidates for attorney general over a month ago. Since I have yet to receive a response, maybe they need to hear from more concerned citizens like yourself!

Feel free to copy and paste any or all of the following and email to:

rob@robbellforag.com

campaign@markobenshain.com


Greetings (Senator Mark Obenshain, Delegate Rob Bell)

Here are some questions I'd appreciate your responses to as a candidate for the office of Attorney General:

1. Do you fully support initiatives like that of Governor McDonnell's Task Force on Alternative Sentencing for Nonviolent Offenders?

2. Do you support ongoing funding for re-entry and rehabilitation programs like the Harrisonburg Diversion Center, Gemeinschaft Home Harrisonburg) and Piedmont House (in Albemarle County)?

3. Would you support legislation banning the use of the restraint chair and the isolated padded cell for mentally ill and suicidally depressed inmates in our jails (such as at HRRJ)?

4. Would you support a continued moratorium on new prison construction in favor of alternatives to incarceration like GPS monitoring technology for appropriate pretrial and post trial cases involving nonviolent offenders with jobs (then mandating that they work to support their families and pay their court costs and fines)?

5. Are you open to considering legislation to help curb gun violence?

6. Do you support Governor McDonnel's recent proposal to restore voting rights to rehabilitated offenders?

I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

An Open Forum In Today's DNR: "In Spite Of Our Differences, We Should All Be Pro-Life"

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 66 percent of legal abortions occur within the first eight weeks of pregnancy, and slightly under 1.2 percent after 21 weeks.

The following appeared in today's issue of the Daily News-Record, an op ed piece I submitted Monday:

In this election season the economy, COVID, climate change, racial injustice and abortion continue to be divisive issues.

The economy, having done well for most since its steady recovery from the 2008 recession, now appears to be on life support. Which candidate or party can offer the most help?

The pandemic also remans a volatile issue, sparking debate over how it should have been handled, and why the US has experienced more deaths from it than any other nation, more than all of our fatalities from all of our wars since WW II.

Extreme weather events, which climatologists are now convinced are caused by human activity, have also created a storm of controversy. Who is responsible and what if anything can we humans do about unprecedented wildfires in the western US and in the Amazon basin, and about massive hurricanes causing flooding and unimaginable destruction? And we still argue over whether our planet would have been better off had a more environmentally minded president been elected in 2000 rather than one who led us into two unfunded and protracted wars.

Also creating new levels of division and mistrust are the disproportionate number of African-Americans suffering injustice and even death at the hands of police and criminal justice systems meant to protect them—along with inflammatory accusations of massive looting and lawlessness by protestors. Who can best help us arrive at truth and experience much needed reconciliation?

Then there’s abortion, another issue that has remained extremely divisive. But might it offer us the greatest hope of our being able to work together? Thankfully, the number of abortions in the US has been in steady decline since the spike in reported cases following Roe v Wade (reported is the key word here). This reduction has happened under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and in Red and Blue jurisdictions alike, suggesting that factors like the availability of better education and healthcare may matter far more than who occupies the White House, the Congress or the Supreme Court.

So what if progressives, conservatives, evangelicals and all people of goodwill could work together to help make abortions rare, and collaborate in helping provide better healthcare for all mothers and all children? 

While we may not all agree on when ensoulment happens or personhood begins, could we at least agree that a precious form of human life is present at conception and continues through the time we all draw our first breath and until we breathe our last? And could we support pro-life values that would help us combat such anti-life foes as war, disease, racism, poverty, climate change, homelessness and gun violence?

Catholic Sister Joan Chittister reminds us that simply being anti-abortion isn’t enough. “Your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed… That’s not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

The Horror in Aurora

James Holmes

"Prepare a chain, because the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence." Ezekiel 7:23

Admittedly, tighter gun controls would not in themselves have prevented James Holmes, the alleged killer at Theater 9 in Aurora, Colorado,  from creating havoc there earlier this week. And I agree that the underlying problem is that we are a nation that appears to be becoming increasingly sick in ways both morally and mentally.

But while we are assessing the part a pornographically violent entertainment industry and other societal problems may play in this, some sensible limits on the kinds of guns, particularly semi-automatic assault weapons with huge ammunition clips, are in my mind long, long overdue. Such a prohibition was in place in the US until 1994, and the number of people slaughtered by such weapons has increased dramatically since then.

Here’s a part of what my friend Barkley Rosser, an economics professor at James Madison University, just posted on his blog:

In particular, this tragedy in Aurora makes clear that all the yapping by NRA propagandists that individuals carrying guns can/will stop madmen from killing lots of people (something we heard from these people after Cho shot up VA Tech, only to have the VA legislature fall all over itself genuflecting to the most ridiculous and obscene requests from the NRA), does not cut it.  Holmes could not be stopped by all these junior Zimmermans and fantasists training so hard to protect "us" from whomever they thought were threatening us.  No way.  This guy had body armor, and that is how it will be in the future.  This particular fantasy of the NRA and its bootlickers is dead in the aisles of Theater 9 of Aurora, Colorado.  Sorry guys, grow up.

My final point is to any true believer in the super sanctity of gun rights.  Sorry, but this is not a universally recognized right.  The only other nation that has similar legal views to the US in the entire world is Honduras, whose gun dealers compete with ours for supplying the drug cartels in Mexico. If any of you are proud of this, so be it. I am not. The US was arguably the major inspiration for individual human rights in the world, with the French Declaration on this following after ours, and the 1948 UN Declaration clearly modeled on ours as well.  But none of those, and nobody else's (except world-inspiring Honduras!), has followed us on this particular matter, where our ancestors' "need" to keep injuns, slaves, wetbacks, and other potentially troublesome people from our"frontier," in line.  Again, this last jibe on my part is simply a recognition of the power of path dependence and the historical record of the US that makes it so difficult to do anything about this, even such screamingly obvious things as banning assault weapons that no civilian has any obvious or legitimate use for is at least one obvious move that might improve things.

You can read his entire post here: http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2012/07/more-guns-more-equilibria.htm.
For a tongue-in-cheek perspective on the Second Amendment, here's a link to the post "The Right to Bear Cars."

Local Hearing Set On Our County Becoming A "Second Amendment Sanctuary"

Should we require a well regulated militia in our County?

I predict there will be a full house at the Spotswood High School gym next Wednesday, December 11, when our local Board of Supervisors will hear public comments at around 7:15 pm on whether to join other counties around the country declaring ourselves a "Second Amendment Sanctuary." The gymnasium will be open at 6:30.

Page, Augusta and other nearby counties have already done so, and the pressure is on to have members for our board of Supervisors do the same.

I grew up on a farm and we used our Winchester 22 rifle whenever needed at butchering time and to help keep various varmints in check. I have nothing against responsible gun ownership for hunting and other legitimate purposes.

I do question the value of our becoming a "Second Amendment Sanctuary," however.  I know the primary argument in favor of being armed is for legitimate "protection." And "sanctuary" has a nice, safe sound to it, a word I really like when it refers to providing safe haven for vulnerable people like refugees fleeing from violence, for example.

But face it, guns don't primarily protect. They are by their very nature offensive, not defensive instruments. Armor protects. Forts protect. Locked doors protect. But weapons can only destroy and kill, or be used as a part of a threat to do so.

It can be argued, of course, that destroying, maiming or killing bad guys bent on harming the innocent rids us of threats and has the affect of protecting us. So I do believe a well regulated sheriff and/or police force is a necessary thing in a violence-prone world.

But providing "sanctuary" and offering legitimacy to just any and every kind of unregulated gun owners may make us far less safe. Do we really want to defend the right of white nationalist or Nazi groups to be armed to the teeth? Members of Antifa? Black Panther groups? Card-carrying members of the Communist party?

And if owning our current number of death-dealing instruments helps keep us safe, will encouraging even more citizens to buy ever more guns make us even more safe? I don't think so.

We're told that any sanctuary action taken by a city or county would only be a symbolic gesture. But if we really favor plows over swords, pruning hooks over spears, maybe we should quietly and respectfully show up in numbers this Wednesday with a different message. We could all wear dark sweaters as a sign of solidarity with a community that strives to become more like Mr. Rogers neighborhood and less like a coalition of unregulated individuals with ever more lethal weapons.

We are better than that.

Why Refugees Flee Their Homes

Austin Bachand photo, courtesy of Daily News-Record

The following poem was read by UN refugee worker Myriam Izaz of Lebanon at last evening's vigil at Court Square. The person on the left is Evan Ajin, whose father immigrated from violence ridden Guatamala. He urged us not to turn people away today who need sanctuary as we did Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust in the 30's and 40's.

HOME
by Somali poet Warsan Shire:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don't know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.