Jonalyn Fincher's Blog

A Friendly Firearm Debate – Part 2 – ... East L.A.: Diversity and Me

A Friendly Firearm Debate – Part 3 – Christian Options

Jonalyn Final Rebuttal continued from Part 2:

The second and most important reason I carry is . . .

. . . because I’m a mother. Since I have a young child, I believe it’s my responsibility to protect him. From bears and lions and from predators.

Every year 800,000 children are reported missing. Some are kidnapped by a family member, others run away. But out of these 800,000, 58,000 children are abducted by non-family members.

I am carrying in this picture and holding my sleeping son. This is White Woods during a GREEN Gathering.

Of that 58,000, 115 are killed, injured, held for ransom or kept indefinitely. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children).

Since my son is often in public with me, I feel direct, personal responsibility for his safety. The United States Supreme Court Case, “Castle Rock Vs. Gonzales” ruled, “7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued

for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murder of a woman’s three children by her estranged husband.” This means that our Supreme Court does not believe the police exist as our personal protection force. Each person is responsible to defend him or herself. In Colorado citizens have the right to use lethal force in instances in kidnapping. In the Gonzales case, a mother’s children were kidnapped and murdered even though she had called the police to intervene. Lesson learned: you cannot expect the police to protect you.

Now, I don’t think every person is required to own a firearm to prove they love their family, but it certainly is one way to show love. It is a way I show my love. It’s inconvenient, easily mis-understood and incredibly serious. It’s expensive and invasive to my style. It’s sobering, since a firearm, simply by its existence, says that evil exists and may harm us. My firearm makes me more aware of evil and good.

One final incredibly relevant and difficult point: the same God who said “turn the other cheek” is the God who commanded his people to kill. God commanded war throughout the conquering of the promised land. And it’s not just an Old Testament thing. Consider Revelation 19:11 when the Judge named Righteous and True fights to kill the enemy of our souls.

If it comes to strategy Christians have some serious options. There’s not only one Christian position regarding weapons or lethal force. God repeatedly used and supported people who used violence for justice (Exodus 17:8-16, Esther 9:13-19). There is a Christianity that does not know what to do with these passages. And I know it’s much simpler to dismiss them as outdate, Old Testament weirdness or prophetic literature no one can interpret, but that has not, so far, satisfied my mind. One thing I’m certain of, I want a God who doesn’t neatly fit into boutique spirituality or the PC or conservative politics of my day. I’m searching for a golden thread that weaves the conquering and slaughter of the OT with the Jesus who died for us with the King of glory who will come again wielding a sword.

To be quite honest, Seth, the pacifist position popularized recently by Shane Claiborne , is quite attractive to me on a personal level. If I didn’t have a son and have a public position and if I didn’t live in White Woods, I might move that direction. I was raised Quaker and appreciate the strategy of pacifism, though to be a pacifist, you would need to be against the police and military force as well.

I respect your desire to not own or carry a gun, to take the risk to be more vulnerable. I feel the same for Martin Luther King Jr. who was engaged in making massive change through passive resistance. I admire him, but I do not see that his way as the only or best Christian way. Jesus turned the other cheek and encouraged us to do the same (Matt 5:39). These are non-violent but rebellious acts of defiance. Jesus said those who draw the sword would also die by the sword (Matt 26:52). But this is the same Jesus who will draw a sword again (Rev 19:15). The man of sorrows of Isaiah 53 is also the one with a sword in his mouth in Revelation.

I wrestle with these passages. Since war is commanded by God for some people in some times, I can’t take pacifism as the only option for Christians today. In fact, it seems short-sighted to cherry-pick the pacifist passages in Scripture when justice and acts of physical violence bookend most of the Old Testament and the righting of all the evil both before and after Jesus came.

As Jesus explained in Matthew 26, he needed his disciples to accept the violence in that time in order to fulfill scripture.

Can we say the same? Do we need to put ourselves in evil’s reach to fulfill scripture?

I own firearms, but I do not plan to ever have to draw them. And as far as turning the other cheek, I practice this, too. I can always refuse to draw my weapon. By carrying, I am not obligated to draw. I can die at the hand of my assailant.

But I want to be intentional about what I live and die for. If I refuse to draw it will be because someone has asked me to take a stand for Jesus and his people and my death will be best used to show that. I don’t want to die or have my son kidnapped simply because someone wants to rape me.

Seth, I’ll give you the last word:

Seth’s final rebuttal:

Jonalyn, thanks for the thorough response. I don’t have the time to address every point you raise, but let me try to get to the heart of our disagreement. I think we disagree first about the role of firearms in creating a civil society. Second, I think we disagree about the possibility of moral clarity amidst fear and confusion.

Before getting into those disagreements, I want to call out something I’m hearing in your posts that might suggest agreement. You repeatedly emphasize the need to enforce the gun laws we have better. I agree. But I also think we need to strengthen those laws. I know that any line we draw will be arbitrary: why choose to allow a 10-round magazine but not a 30-round magazine? Or ban AR-15s when we allow semi-automatic handguns? But the answer I hear from so many gun rights advocates is that since the line will always be arbitrary, better not to draw the line at all. The major gun rights organizations in this country preach a sort of Second Amendment absolutism that I don’t hear from you. You seem to want to close loopholes, to raise the age and training necessary for concealed carry permits, and to institute better to promote training and education for firearms. Frankly, I would be thrilled to work for common ground if I heard more arguments like yours. I would like to hear from people who know firearms better than I do what would be a sensible line to draw. But so often gun rights organizations seem determined not to give an inch.

Onto our disagreements. You write, “It has long been believed that the possibility of swift justice makes for a more polite society.” Who believes this? People who own guns? People who want to sell guns? I don’t believe that the possibility of swift justice makes a more polite society. I don’t want politeness enforced by the presence of a gun. That seems more likely, at a basic level, to stifle free speech. More tragically, the romance of swift justice produces unnecessary deaths. The public health studies that have been done on gun violence show that gun violence increases as private gun ownership increases. These public health studies stopped in 1996 under political pressure from gun rights groups, who lobbied Congress successfully to prohibit federal funding going to any research that would promote gun control. Why? Groups like the Centers for Disease Control were finding that more guns make us less safe. People who lived in homes with firearms were far more likely to die of gun violence. Since that research has been under-funded by the federal government for 16 years, we don’t know enough about the causal relationship between the U.S.’s high rate of gun ownership and high rate of gun deaths. We do know that countries with fewer firearms, by and large, have less gun violence than the United States. You question my Australia example repeatedly, and that’s fine. The United States is a different sort of place. But the list of countries in the western world with less gun violence than us is long. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that we have some of the most lax gun laws among industrialized nations. I also doubt that a smart effort at reducing the number of guns in the United States would make us less safe in the long run, though I am speculating here (as is Goldberg in his Atlantic piece).

What you’ve outlined above are a series of individual situations where having a gun would prevent violence. I have no doubt that we could create a number of individual situations where this is true. But the reality is that not all gun owners are like you, and that even those who are make mistakes sometime. The number of mistakes is relatively small, given how many guns are in circulation, but how high does it have to be before we say that maybe the answer isn’t more guns but fewer? What I’d like to see is a concentrated effort to reduce the number of guns in the United States, though not to the point of universal disarmament. We need people who love guns to be part of this process, to help us know how our laws can be smarter. But what I hear too often from the defenders of gun rights is an unwillingness to consider any limitations on the types of guns or ammunition available.

More fundamentally, the logic of your position suggests a sort of moral clarity in violent situations that I’m not sure exists, especially for Christians. I was intrigued by your hypothetical about not pulling the trigger on an assailant. That’s an interesting point, but I have serious doubts about my ability to make the right decisions in such a life-or-death situation. We know that in some situations, innocent bystanders are shot by even well-trained police or soldiers, as happened in the Empire State building shooting last year and in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the best training fails in the fog of war, as well as on the streets amidst confusion. Here I think about the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida: would George Zimmerman have approached Martin if Zimmerman wasn’t carrying a weapon? Could that death have been avoided if a gun wasn’t present? I certainly think so. This piece, by historian Claire Potter, offers a great account of a situation where a professor’s possession of a firearm would have made a campus shooting more tragic than it already was. It’s a piece that reminds us that fear and confusion can cloud our judgment. When I talk about the illusion of safety, this is partly what I’m driving at. We imagine ourselves to be more capable and more virtuous than we really are.

A few days after the Sandy Hook massacre, NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre said that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun nearby. Leaving aside the reality that some gunmen are talked out of their intentions by unarmed people, how do we know who the good guys are, so we can be sure only to give guns to them? And are any of us truly good enough to resist all the temptations a gun presents, especially in a confusing, threatening situation? I find the world to be a lot more complicated than LaPierre does. I see too many situations where a gun does more harm than good. I see too many situations where flawed human beings have to make instantaneous decisions that result in tragedy. And I see too many situations where access to a gun allows people of ill intent to cause far more death than they would have been able to otherwise. Are those tragedies the price we have to pay for the right to bear arms?

Audience applauds and files out of theater.

Seth and Jonalyn shake hands and make plans to visit Murphy’s Pub for a beer.