Thanks to everyone who prayed for me recently upon hearing about my
unplanned trip to the hospital. I have to admit that I was also a bit
alarmed when the EMTs said they thought I was having a heart attack.
Thankfully, the heart specialist did not agree. I’ll be following up
with our family doc to see if we can identify any other possible causes
for my loss of consciousness. I’ve been taking a gently-enforced week
off this week at the suggestion of several people at church. I’m
thankful and a bit awed that there are so many people who found out
about this so quickly, and at the level of support for me and my family.
So, thanks be to God first for the excellent medical care He provides
for us, and especially for the certainty of eternal life that we have in
Jesus Christ. I was absolutely ready to see Him, and utterly confident
of His mercy toward a sinner like me (even though I wasn’t so sure about
the heart attack thing). Thanks also to the EMTs, doctors, nurses, and
other professionals that took such good care of me when minutes might
have made a big difference, as far as we knew. Whether they realized it
or not, they (like everyone who fulfills their godly vocation on Earth)
were acting as the hands of God in service to their neighbor.
Speaking of minutes making a difference, you might have watched the
YouTube video I embedded in a recent post about violent attacks. The
best 911 response times, when the responders don’t happen to be
next-door already, are usually measured in minutes. If you’re confident
that you could hold off a violent attacker for as long as it takes
without the use of deadly force, then you probably don’t have a dog in
the gun control fight that our esteemed President has brought to
Washington, D.C, again. But if you think you might want the ability to
apply a level of force that could possibly kill, when someone is
threatening or using such force upon you and your loved-ones, then you
should be deeply interested in the outcome of this latest attempt to
undermine the Second Amendment and the civil right of American citizens
to keep and bear arms.
My last post here distinguished between reason, emotion, and faith as
motivating factors in an argument such as this. The term “assault
weapon” is meant to evoke an emotional response. Assault is an attack
upon another person. Any weapon used for such a thing might be called an
assault weapon. For example, recent statistics have been repeated in
several places that hammers and other blunt objects are continually the
most frequently-used murder weapons. Or if you prefer, “assault
weapons.” The word “assault” produces an emotional response, because
it’s something everyone wants to avoid in the context of civil society.
The only acceptable context for “assault” is war, so the inventors and
purveyors of the term “assault weapon” are trying to argue that whatever
weapons they think are so described have no legitimate function in civil
society. They are wrong in their use of language, and also wrong in
their argument. If you want to be deceived by demagoguery, then by all
means, ignore the truth. If you want to avoid being deceived and used
as a political tool, then you should learn the truth about this
recently-coined term. You can find it here:
www.assaultweapon.info.
It seems that President Obama continues in his attempt to manipulate
emotion by gathering with children in front of television cameras. He
hopes that we will identify those children with others in our own lives,
and visualize the horror of their deaths, and therefore (in his mind)
the necessity of outlawing all those nasty guns. Especially “assault
weapons.” The President and others who have used children that way (not
unlike human shields) hope that this strong emotion will prevent your
reason from seeing the great weakness of their rational arguments, and
that you will gladly give up some of your civil rights in exchange for
his (empty) promise of greater safety for your children.
Let me suggest an alternative emotional response. Those children with
President Obama are indeed children who need protection from violence
when it happens, and so are the children in your life. Disarming the
people who are seconds away from protecting those children actually
places them in greater danger. It doesn’t make them any safer. Don’t
be disturbed that I seem to be giving the lie to the President’s agenda.
It’s not personal, nor based upon his race. If anything, it’s because
he’s a politician with a well-meaning but absolutely wrong agenda. He
has full faith in the ability of government to solve problems like this,
when nobody on Earth can eliminate violence and evil. We already have
the best answer for that in the Second Amendment (for when seconds
count), in the 911 system (for when minutes will do), and in the justice
system (for the aftermath). So if you want to identify with the
children used by politicians on this point, a better emotional response
is this: decide to protect them from violence by preparing to shoot the
perpetrator before he or she tries to harm a child, while you are
waiting for the 911 responders to show up.
President Obama proposes to accept all responsibility for the safety of
your children (on behalf of law enforcement personnel throughout the
country) in exchange for some of your freedom. That’s not the answer,
for two reasons. First, the primary responsibility remains yours and
mine. Second, it’s an empty promise that neither he nor any other
government official, nor the entire force of government in the United
States can fulfill, even if we were to become a totalitarian, despotic
nation with no civil rights or freedoms reserved for the citizens.
An AR-15 or handgun with plenty of bullets in the magazine, in the hands
of a trained and responsible American citizen who happens to be in the
right place at the right time, has the potential to save many lives of
both children and adults from the acts of one or more violent criminals.
As the President and Vice President have said, if something has the
potential to save only one life, it’s worth considering. What if it has
already saved a great many lives? Then it’s worth keeping.
Now, maybe you don’t trust your fellow citizens to do the right thing.
If not, then why would you trust politicians, bureaucrats, and law
enforcement personnel to do the right thing? Are they not your fellow
citizens too?
If it’s a matter of training, did you know that citizens like you can
get trained to the same levels of skill by schools like Front
Sight and people like Massad Ayoob? If you’re not
comfortable with fellow citizens having such training, then again, why
would you be comfortable with any fellow citizen having such training?
Law enforcement officers are fellow citizens, too, as are soldiers and
sailors.
Maybe your disposition is not compatible with the possibility of dealing
with a violent encounter, and you prefer that someone else provide the
protection you need. That’s fine. But don’t be fooled into thinking
that disarming your law-abiding neighbors will make you any safer. It
would make you less safe, because the people who want to harm you will
not be disarmed. In fact, the disturbing truth is that those who would
harm you don’t even need any particular weapon to do it. If you want to
be safer, then encourage your fellow law-abiding citizens to do what is
necessary to defend you when the need arises. The same goes for the
safety of your children. Statistics bear this out. A pertinent case
study in recent decades is Kennesaw, Georgia. Compare the rate of
violent crime in those parts of the country where the civil right of
bearing arms is curtailed to those parts where it is not. You are safer
where more of your neighbors have more guns.
Christians might be disturbed by the possibility of causing the death of
another person. The Fifth Commandment says “You shall not murder.” I’ve
discussed this at length on this blog, and would refer you to those
posts. But in brief, consider what this commandment means (emphasis
added). “We should fear and love God, so that we do no bodily harm to
our neighbor, but help and befriend him in every need.” Failing to
defend your neighbor, including children, is as much a violation of this
commandment as the intentional and malicious killing of another human
being. Leaving this responsibility entirely to President Obama and law
enforcement officers is a de facto abdication of that responsibility,
because even with the best of intentions, they cannot defend our lives
in every case, and their efforts will almost always be less effective.
The bottom line is that the Fifth Commandment requires each of us to
assume a personal role in the defense of our own children and every
neighbor.
Speaking of guilt, some lawmakers seem to feel guilty when a horrific
murder occurs. They assume that a law could have prevented the
murder(s), so they try to adjust the laws after the fact. As a pastor,
let me assure our lawmakers that you are not responsible for the acts
of such monsters. However, if you disarm the victims or those who might
have defended them, then you are partly to blame for those deaths.
There is no other way to see it. So the people who make schools,
shopping malls, or theaters into “gun-free zones” are partly to blame
when the victims are defenseless against those who pay no mind to the
little “gun-free zone” sign on the door. Man up and bear it, because
there’s no other way to see it. But let me also assure you that Jesus
Christ died upon His cross to remove the guilt of that sin. In Him, God
has forgiven you, just as He forgives lawmakers, and even politicians.
Jesus opens the way for you to eternal life, and that fact should now
motivate you to do the right thing, while you still can. That’s the
motivation of faith.
What to do? If you want to be safer, send a message to your elected
representatives at every level that the civil right protected by the
Second Amendment is essential to the safety of our citizens and our
families. Gun violence is only a small part of the general problem of
violence in our country. But when you are confronted with violence of
any kind, then your safety and the peace of our society dictates that
you also need access to violence in order to protect the lives of
innocents. The best way to give you that access is to preserve the
Second Amendment in its full force. That’s how to make our society safer for both
children and adults.