By David Gushee
And so Tucson joins Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, the Pennsylvania Amish schoolchildren, the Long Island Railroad killings, the Wisconsin church shooting and others.
They come upon us one after another. Who can even remember them all? We are shocked. We grieve. We wait for the next one. We change nothing. Nothing!
Here is a compilation of statistics from various newspaper articles over the week since Tucson. Do we have the capacity to see how insane these numbers are?
— Between 1968 and today, over 1 million Americans have been killed with guns, in homicides, suicides and accidents.
— 150,000 of our fellow citizens have been murdered since the start of the 21st century; not counting the 3,000 of 9/11. (We still grieve the 3,000 and are determined to prevent more such victims; why not the same concern for the 150,000?)
— There are 283 million guns for the 307 million people who live in this country.
— 100,000 Americans are shot or killed with a gun every year.
— American children are 11 times more likely to die in a gun accident than children in other developed countries.
— It has been documented that the presence of a gun in the home leads to more gun suicides, gun homicides and gun accidents, while the chance that a gun will actually deter or stop a home invasion is remote.
Despite the annual mass gun killings in the United States, federal gun laws have loosened rather than tightened in recent years. This is a direct result of the powerful lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association. Examples:
— There was an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004. This ban expired in 2004 and the NRA helped prevent its reauthorization. So assault weapons with the capacity to do mass murder continue to be freely available, including to the likes of Jared Loughner.
— Gun control forces have been unsuccessful in passing a proposal to limit the number of gun purchases by an individual to one per month. One per month — no, that’s way too strict!
— Efforts to restrict the sale of oversized gun magazines, like the 33-round clip that the lunatic killer employed in Tucson, have been unsuccessful. There is no plausible personal security reason why a homeowner would need a 33-round clip. But it comes in very handy if you want to do mass murder on a Saturday morning.
— Having secured the right to have as many guns as one might want in one’s home, gun lobbyists have had astonishing success, depending on the state, in extending the right to carry guns to include public places such as bars, parks, offices, even churches.
— Our background check system must be strengthened, but these efforts have been blocked by our NRA friends. Jared Loughner was visibly disturbed enough to be kicked out of community college and rejected by the Army. But he was able to walk into a sporting goods store and buy a Glock-19, and then walk into another store and buy that 33-round clip. We regulate cars, medicines, food, toys and life insurance more carefully than guns.
— Canada has a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun. That would never happen here. We think it really important that a person in whatever state of mind be able to sail through a cursory background check and buy whatever weapons of neighbor destruction he might want on a given day.
The most striking statistics, however, may be the following:
— Gun sales jumped by 60 percent in Arizona on the Monday after the shooting.
— Two Congressmen said they would start carrying guns when they met the public.
This is the classic definition of a vicious cycle — deeply enmeshed in a pattern of gun violence and deeply afraid of becoming victimized by gun violence, we buy more guns while loosening rather than tightening gun laws, thus actually increasing the chances that we or our loved ones will die a gun death.
All of which has to lead to the conclusion that there is a spiritual reality underneath this social sickness. Is it too much to say that we are in the grip of “principalities and powers” that delight in the suffering they incite us to inflict on one another?
Oh, by the way, happy Martin Luther King Day. He was shot to death, too. Remember?