Perhaps you heard that the Supreme Court struck down the decision of lower courts to permit local cities to ban handguns. The Supreme Court says, rightfully, that this violates the Second Amendment that gives US citizens the right to bear arms. Well, yes, ... of course, but ...
It's not right. Why?
We can argue intent: was the intent of the framers to bear arms so thugs could carry guns around and shoot innocent folks? I doubt that entered into their decision. But, give that point away, they knew that the right to bear arms meant that humans, cracked Eikons that they are, could and would use guns for murder. And they still framed the law so that US citizens could bear arms. Fair enough.
So, what's my beef? Times have changed. A law designed in the 17th and 18th Centuries, emerging as it did when most used guns to hunt for food, who used guns to protect themselves from invaders, and who might need a gun should the country go to war, plain and simply is not the world in which we live and in which contemporary citizens carry guns.
Yes indeed, some folks use guns for hunting; some rely on hunting with guns to supply food for the family. Fair enough.
They're not our problem.
Who is our problem? Let's agree to call them thugs. Cracked Eikons who are carrying guns to kill other human beings who are unarmed.
I find no reason why reasonable US citizens can't agree to restrict the ownership and the right to carry guns unless they have an explicitly, and approved, good reason to do so -- if someone needs their shotgun to shoot some pheasants, if someone wants to hunt deer or whatever, fine -- get a permit, get a gun, and get the gun stored in some safe place (protected from the public) where that person can go that place and "check it out" for hunting, and then return it to the safe place on their way home.
No one, so far as I can see, needs to have a handgun, live and loaded, on them in public. No one. But cops.
And that's my opinion.
The Supreme Court decision is a classic example of being legal and right but dead wrong, in my opinion of course. Like the priest and levite who chose to avoid touching what they thought was a dead corpse but, in avoiding contracting impurity, missed the whole point of the law -- to love God and to love others.
Everyone's weighing on this one today. Here's Time's piece.
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As mentioned in one of the initial comments, the real issue with this ruling is not what we think about gun ownership, but what the constitution thinks about gun ownership. The job of the supreme court is to decide what the constitution means, not what it should mean in light of todays changing times. Perhaps some of the justices who voted against the ban on constitutional grounds, were actually in favor of it. But they did their job in as much as they faithfully informed us what the founding father's actually meant.
Amending the constitution is difficult, as it should be. Those who feel that times have changed sufficient to warrant changing the constitution, or that the founding fathers were wrong, should role up their sleeves and seek an amendment. The alternative is frightening. Do we really want nine un-elected people with no term limits deciding for us what the founding fathers should have said? Writing our nations laws is the job of the people, not a select few.
I do see the anabaptist interpretation of Jesus' teaching such that it advocates radical pacifism to be an over-extrapolation. Nowhere do I see Jesus teach that legitimate authority should use the power given to it by God to protect the helpless and establish justice. And I daresay this includes the authority of a father and a husband to defend his children and wife from an intruder. However we might like to say that "'violence' never solves anything", it WAS the disparate and heroic actions of the Tutsi rebels that finally stopped the Rwandan genocide (and yes, they used guns, and not just kisses). The pacifists here need to take this to heart - to realize that their cavalier and all-encompassing use of the word "violence" equates those who liberated the Nazi concentration camps with those who ran them, and those who ended the Rwandan genocide with those who began them.
Having said all this, I think the point is a weighty one, nonetheless - that Jesus very much challenged our notions of power and how we expect the kingdom of God to come. And here I think the traditional ancient Christian faith has the right balance - where soldiers may be blessed by the church but still have sanctions upon them when they must kill to do their duty. Where a man may kill legitimately, but this still disqualifies him from the priesthood. The analogy I see is that of eating meat - we rightly decry the bondage of creation to decay and death - where we cannot eat but by the death of another creature. But to say simply that all Christians may eat nothing but the Eucharist is to over-immanentize the eschaton in my view. We still groan. We still must, as George Manly Hopkins says, "kill and eat with wonder". We still must defend our little ones from those who would destroy them - how else would we be like our father in heaven, who defends his people?
The difference between us who have taken on board Jesus' message and those who resisted him is seen well in an allegory from Lord of the Rings. Sauron and Saruman must be resisted. They must be fought. It is the noble, though deeply ambiguous calling of the men of the west to give their lives in struggle against this evil foe. And yet these noble efforts are doomed to failure in the long run. Sauron's power will not be overcome by force of arms, but by loving sacrifice and weakness of a hobbit, taking upon himself the evil of the world and walking into the fire of death. This is where the final victory comes, and this is where the kingdom really breaks in. But just because we know the kingdom of God comes in weakness through the cross does NOT mean that those whom God has given strength and authority are not called to use it in defense of justice in this veil of tears wherein we live. It just means that these powers must not mistake their calling for the highest one, or their efforts to resist evil as the central ones.
This, I submit, is an understanding that takes Jesus' core message seriously without demonizing the authorities that Paul spoke of in Romans (or, for that matter, the acts of God in the OT whereby he defended his people from their enemies).
Sorry - the above second sentence should read:
Nowhere do I see Jesus teach that legitimate authority SHOULDN'T use the power given to it by God to protect the helpless and establish justice.
Check out John Piper's personal reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on handguns. http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/1288_guns_and_martyrdom/
#176, Joel, thanks for that. I'm going to have to cut Piper some more slack!
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