NRA in St Louis column

I see the National Rifle Association is in the area with an enormous convention of some 70,000 people. Sportsmen get to enjoy acres of sporting goods. I think I saw that our area will get over 35 million dollars in business from this gathering. My problem with the NRA is its political and social agenda. I admire the tenacity, hard work, and grass roots support they have garnered to make their views public and powerful. I continue to be astonished that they have managed to convince the Supreme Court to agree with their long-held assertions that the Second amendment is a personal right, detached from its wording of “a well-regulated militia.” In my view, every Christian has to come to grips with pacifism as the Christian response to violence. I do realize that few Christians are pacifists. In the just war tradition, we follow notions of self defense and protection of the innocent seriously at the individual and social levels. Yes, guns are used in self-defense at least a million times a year. Public safety, however, is a public concern. Civilized societies put violence in the hands of the public authority. Vigilante justice is injustice, as witnessed with the storm in florida and the stand your ground law. The NRA vision of America is a grim one. In reality crime has gone down in this country for some time. In the NRA image, lethal predators lurk around every corner. In reality, we are the longest standing stable democracy in the world. In the NRA vision, citizens are fearful of government tyranny set upon disarming its citizen-hunters. Let’s be reminded of some stubborn, inconvenient things: facts. We have 9500 murders by guns in the last numbers I checked. 100, 000 people are shot every year. 3, 000 children are killed by guns every year, and almost 200 of those are accidents. While guns are used for self-defense, they are much more likely, if kept in the home, to be used in homicide of a relative or a death by accident. Abusers often use their possession of a firearm to cow their victims into submission to their reign of terror. When a gun I sin the home, suicide is often the weapon of choice. Let’s look at the numbers another way. Since 1979, 100,000 children have died from gunshot. Compare that to our losses, our terrible losses, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The plague of AIDS has taken perhaps 600,000 lives from 1985-the middle of the first decade of the new century. At a smaller level, we have massacres in schools and colleges. W ehave had a federal judge murdered and a member of congress disabled in Arizona and not a political peep about controlling gun violence. In our own area, we are urged to have easier weapon access, notwithstanding that such laws led to an increase in gun violence in cities such as Jacksonville, Florida. I fear we live in a time when facts fall fallow on the mental landscape. Instead, we place facts into a narrative of our choosing. When facts don’t fit that framework, we discard, or we accuse the presenters of bias. We seek not information, but to have pre-existing opinions confirmed. Instead of marshalling evidence, we build up our version of interpreting our social world. Increasingly we rely on emotional appeals, outright fantasy, to uncover deep seated prejudices and conceptions. When will we oppose the merchants of death with the political skill they possess and use so well?