Baptist News Global
Sections
  • News
  • Opinion
  • Curated
  • Storytelling
    • Faith & Justice >
      • Charleston: Metanoia with Bill Stanfield
      • Charlotte: QC Family Tree with Greg and Helms Jarrell
      • Little Rock: Judge Wendell Griffen
      • North Carolina: Conetoe
    • Welcoming the Stranger >
      • Lost Boys of Sudan: St. John’s Baptist Charlotte
      • Awakening to Immigrant Justice: Myers Park Baptist Church
      • Hospitality on the corner: Gaston Christian Center
    • Signature Ministries >
      • Jake Hall: Gospel Gothic, Music and Radio
    • Singing Our Faith >
      • Hymns for a Lifetime: Ken Wilson and Knollwood Baptist Church
      • Norfolk Street Choir
    • Resilient Rural America >
      • Alabama: Perry County
      • Texas: Hidalgo County
      • Arkansas Delta
      • Southeast Kentucky
  • More
    • Contact
    • About
    • Donate
      • #GivingNewsDay
    • Letters to the Editor
    • Advertising
    • Ministry Jobs and More
    • Transitions
    • Subscribe to BNG
Support independent, faith-based journalism. Donate
Search Search this site

Beto O’Rourke’s debate invective and the new ‘Back to School’ video are the jeremiads of our time

OpinionBill Leonard  |  September 20, 2019

Bill LeonardFor the last few days, every time I see a clip of Beto O’Rourke’s outburst about firearms at the third Democrat Presidential Debate I can’t hold back the tears. Perhaps it’s my advanced age, but tears seem to come all too easily as the ripple effects of the 302 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year work their way through families and communities. At the Presidential Debate, O’Rourke referenced the case of one specific parent and her badly wounded, dying daughter in Odessa, Texas, a shooting in which six others died and 22 were wounded.

That image alone is more than enough to bring on the tears. Yet, sadly, many public reactions to O’Rourke’s comments conveyed more concern for the guns than for the dead.

When asked if he was proposing confiscation of all AR-15 and AK-47 semi-automatic weapons, O’Rourke, filled with pathos verging on rage (or rage verging on pathos), replied, “I am.” Suddenly, what began as a political statement became an American jeremiad.

O’Rourke continued: “If it’s a weapon designed to kill people on a battlefield; if the high-impact, high-velocity round when it hits your body shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield so that you wouldn’t be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers. When we see that being used against children. And in Odessa I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15, and that mother watched her bleed to death, over the course of an hour, because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa, in Midland, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time.”

Then he shouted, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used on fellow Americans anymore.”

The crowd roared, and the airwaves went all agog with furious gun owners, concerned Democrats and elated Republicans. Gun owner and Texas state legislator Briscoe Cain tweeted, “My AR is ready for you, Robert Francis,” referencing Beto’s legal name. O’Rourke reported those comments to the FBI as a death threat.

“The real tragedy of the frenzy over O’Rourke’s remarks is that the national conversation they sparked seems more intent on saving guns than on saving human beings.”

Some Democratic Party leaders went apoplectic over O’Rourke’s debate comments. Senator Chris Coons said it was not a wise “policy or political move,” predicting “that clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies that try to scare people by saying Democrats are coming for your guns.” When asked on CNN if O’Rourke was “playing into the hands of Republicans,” presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg replied, “Yes,” asserting that “this is a golden moment to finally do something.”

True to form, at a rally the next day President Donald Trump warned his red-capped New Mexico audience that “Democrats want to take away your guns” and labeled gun ownership a “God-given” and “sacred right.” A few days after that, he declared, “Dummy Beto made it much harder to make a deal. . . . Convinced many that Dems just want to take your guns away. Will continue forward!”

Are the American people and their legislators so fragile, so committed to firearm protection and proliferation, that one measly politician, sick to death of all the dying, can demand radical action against the weapons of choice for multiple mass shooters, and in doing so cancel out any new firearm regulations all together?

After the Odessa and Dayton shootings, Trump warned of increased gun laws: “They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away. We’re not going to let that happen.” The slippery slope myth is a favorite NRA referent, based on the theory that too many firearm regulations could ultimately result in the loss of Second Amendment rights entirely. Take one type of weapon designed specifically for maximum killing impact off the shelves and next thing you know all our guns are gone.

For me, the larger issue is not whether AR-15s or AK-47s will be confiscated; they won’t be in my lifetime, and maybe not ever, largely because that’s logistically and legally impossible. California alone houses at least a million assault weapons. American firearms are not on a slippery slope to confiscation.

No, the real tragedy of the frenzy over O’Rourke’s remarks is that the national conversation they sparked seems more intent on saving guns than on saving human beings. To his credit, Senator Coons acknowledged: “I respect [O’Rourke’s] passion. Anyone who has had to sit with the parents of victims of gun violence, parents who have lost their children, as I have, after the Sandy Hook shooting, after the Tucson shooting. . . . To sit with a parent who has lost a child and have no answer about how we’re going to make the country safer is a very hard experience.”

“The slippery slope myth is a favorite NRA referent, [but] firearms aren’t on the slippery slope; the American people are.”

Other than Coons, and of course O’Rourke, I’ve not heard anyone else on cable television or social media give serious attention to “a 15-year-old girl,” her body shredded by gunshots, whose “mother watched her bleed to death” waiting on an ambulance.

Responses to O’Rourke’s comments are, I think, confirmation of where we are as a nation in the year of our Lord(?) 2019. The American Republic seems so bound by the Second Amendment as a “God given, sacred right,” that mass shootings increasingly seem a regrettable kind of collateral damage, the sad reality of non-negotiable weaponry. The NRA says that the AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the United States.

In America 2019, firearms aren’t on the slippery slope; the American people are. We’re the ones buying bulletproof backpacks for school children; rehearsing active shooter drills and lockdowns in schools, offices and worship centers; and checking out the nearest exit immediately after entering a public event space. We’re the ones whose kids are scared to go to school.

That reality is poignantly captured in a new “Back to School” video released this week by SandyHookPromise that shows children using backpacks, jackets, sneakers, pens and skateboards to protect themselves from active shooters in their schools. It concludes with a girl locked down in a toilet, weeping and texting, “I love you Mom.”

Beto O’Rourke’s debate invective and the SandyHookPromise video are jeremiads of our time.

A jeremiad is a “prolonged lamentation or complaint,” recalling the declarations of the prophet Jeremiah calling Israel to restore justice and righteousness in their national and personal conduct. In colonial America, jeremiad was a frequent sermonic response of Puritan preachers to the corruption of church and society. The American jeremiad, Harvard Professor Sacvan Bercovitch observed in a book of the same name, “made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate.”

Jeremiads get our attention, demanding our response to moral dilemmas of our own creation. But, we have to ask yet again: What will it take to get the attention of America and its political and religious leaders? As of the day this article was written, Sept. 19, 2019, America has suffered 302 mass shootings in 263 days. Given all that dying, you’d think the congress could at least fund more ambulances.

It’s enough to make you weep.

Related Commentary:

Christy Edwards | I was terrified. Guns were stashed everywhere, right next door to our home


OPINION: Views expressed in Baptist News Global columns and commentaries are solely those of the authors.
Tags:Beto O’RourkeDonald TrumpGun ControlGun violenceGunsmass shootingsSandy Hook
Bill Leonard
More by
Bill Leonard
  • Get BNG headlines in your inbox

  • Embracing the power of story



    We created Storytelling Projects because we believe stories, rooted in the Jesus Story, have the power not only to inform but to transform people and communities.

    We believe in-depth, compelling stories can be sources of spiritual insight, imagination, creativity and hope for all who seek justice and mercy. Read to discover more about our series on:

    Faith and Justice

    Welcoming The Stranger

    Signature Ministries

    Singing Our Faith

    Resilient Rural America

    These series of compelling stories can become vital threads that connect and energize Baptists and other Christians at a time when American culture – and American religion – are increasingly politicized and polarized.
  • Featured

    • Nikki Haley, Confederate memory and the insidious myth of racial ‘reconciliationism’

      Opinion

    • Embracing the Simeons and Annas who keep the faith when we cannot

      Opinion

    • Disaster volunteers face ‘primitive’ conditions in Dorian-ravaged Bahamas

      News

    • Churches need more of Mr. Rogers’s theology of neighborliness

      Opinion

    Read Next:

    The gospel and the limits of consumerism

    OpinionDoyle Sager

    More Articles

    • All
    • News
    • Opinion
    • Curated
    • The Good News of Christmas calls the Church to embrace the ‘F’ word

      OpinionErica Whitaker

    • Nikki Haley, Confederate memory and the insidious myth of racial ‘reconciliationism’

      OpinionChristopher Moore

    • Did the Pope compare Donald Trump to King Herod? Should he?

      NewsBob Allen

    • Embracing the Simeons and Annas who keep the faith when we cannot

      OpinionKate Hanch

    • Ministry jobs and more

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Muhammad appears in top 10 baby name list for the first time

      CuratedHuffPost

    • How the ‘extreme abstinence’ of the purity movement created a sense of shame in evangelical women

      CuratedThe Conversation

    • Disaster volunteers face ‘primitive’ conditions in Dorian-ravaged Bahamas

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Churches need more of Mr. Rogers’s theology of neighborliness

      OpinionAlan Rudnick

    • Tom Ascol, Calvinist leader and social justice critic, hospitalized after collapsing at church

      NewsBob Allen

    • The gospel and the limits of consumerism

      OpinionDoyle Sager

    • Church’s food truck connects with neighbors ‘over a barbecue sandwich’

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Don’t succumb to criticism of ‘Happy Holidays’; it can be an expression of God’s inclusive embrace

      OpinionSusan M. Shaw

    • What our Wilshire congregation learned: Have ‘the conversation’ anyway

      OpinionMark Wingfield

    • Arkansas Supreme Court declines to prevent pastor/judge from hearing attorney general’s cases

      NewsBob Allen

    • New Liberty University think tank aims to revive ‘Christian American culture’

      NewsBob Allen

    • Transitions for the week of 12-6-19

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • What if white Christians had a more realistic image of Jesus, a dark-skinned, religious-minority refugee?

      OpinionLaura Mayo

    • I decided to make a list: 20 actions to cultivate hope

      OpinionMary Hix

    • Ministry jobs and more

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Walker Knight, founding editor of Baptists Today newspaper and former editor of Home Missions magazine, dead at 95

      NewsBob Allen

    • Less TV, more faith needed to help refugees along U.S.-Mexican border

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Telling the truth or creating our own realities? (And the wisdom to know the difference)

      OpinionBill Leonard

    • Impeaching ‘the deeply held faith values’ that brought us a President Trump

      OpinionGreg Jarrell

    • People first: The Supreme Court – and all of us – should protect our 1.5 million known transgender Americans

      OpinionRuss Dean

    • Did the Pope compare Donald Trump to King Herod? Should he?

      NewsBob Allen

    • Ministry jobs and more

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Disaster volunteers face ‘primitive’ conditions in Dorian-ravaged Bahamas

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Tom Ascol, Calvinist leader and social justice critic, hospitalized after collapsing at church

      NewsBob Allen

    • Church’s food truck connects with neighbors ‘over a barbecue sandwich’

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Arkansas Supreme Court declines to prevent pastor/judge from hearing attorney general’s cases

      NewsBob Allen

    • New Liberty University think tank aims to revive ‘Christian American culture’

      NewsBob Allen

    • Transitions for the week of 12-6-19

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Ministry jobs and more

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Walker Knight, founding editor of Baptists Today newspaper and former editor of Home Missions magazine, dead at 95

      NewsBob Allen

    • Less TV, more faith needed to help refugees along U.S.-Mexican border

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Ministry jobs and more

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Judge rules that historically black college and sponsoring denomination share power to name trustees

      NewsBob Allen

    • Franklin Graham terms opposition to Trump ‘almost’ demonic

      NewsBob Allen

    • Trump’s West Bank shocker: are End Times ‘kooks’ running US foreign policy?

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Parting with national body, Tennessee Baptists repudiate Critical Race Theory

      NewsBob Allen

    • Some ministers thrive in the ‘unicorn of church jobs’

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Fallen Southern Baptist leader props up pro-Trump pastor

      NewsBob Allen

    • Transitions for the week of 11-22-19

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • Half of Protestant pastors say opioid abuse affects a church member

      NewsBob Allen

    • Ministry jobs and more

      NewsBarbara Francis

    • BJC, others, urge Supreme Court to allow states to bolster religious-liberty protections

      NewsBob Allen

    • Trump rhetoric, ICE raids shake Miss. immigrants – but this pastor presses on

      NewsJeff Brumley

    • Lottie Moon’s church added to list of protected cultural and historical sites in China

      NewsBob Allen

    • ‘A democracy can die of too many lies,’ warns broadcasting legend Bill Moyers

      NewsBob Allen

    • The Good News of Christmas calls the Church to embrace the ‘F’ word

      OpinionErica Whitaker

    • Nikki Haley, Confederate memory and the insidious myth of racial ‘reconciliationism’

      OpinionChristopher Moore

    • Embracing the Simeons and Annas who keep the faith when we cannot

      OpinionKate Hanch

    • Churches need more of Mr. Rogers’s theology of neighborliness

      OpinionAlan Rudnick

    • The gospel and the limits of consumerism

      OpinionDoyle Sager

    • Don’t succumb to criticism of ‘Happy Holidays’; it can be an expression of God’s inclusive embrace

      OpinionSusan M. Shaw

    • What our Wilshire congregation learned: Have ‘the conversation’ anyway

      OpinionMark Wingfield

    • What if white Christians had a more realistic image of Jesus, a dark-skinned, religious-minority refugee?

      OpinionLaura Mayo

    • I decided to make a list: 20 actions to cultivate hope

      OpinionMary Hix

    • Telling the truth or creating our own realities? (And the wisdom to know the difference)

      OpinionBill Leonard

    • Impeaching ‘the deeply held faith values’ that brought us a President Trump

      OpinionGreg Jarrell

    • People first: The Supreme Court – and all of us – should protect our 1.5 million known transgender Americans

      OpinionRuss Dean

    • Are congregations and seminaries in this work together?

      OpinionMolly T. Marshall

    • Déjà vu: Jewish settlements in Palestine, U.S. policy and support from conservative Christians

      OpinionWendell Griffen

    • Rather than ‘surviving’ family conversations this Thanksgiving, here are 4 ways you can thrive

      OpinionAlan Rudnick

    • What testimony in the impeachment hearings said to me about the power of Christian witness

      OpinionRobert P. Sellers

    • Three years after Standing Rock: another oil spill and reminders of indigenous peoples’ fight for justice

      OpinionKate Hanch

    • How the expectation gap creates trauma for white evangelicals

      OpinionMark Wingfield

    • This is how despotism works – enabled by conservative white evangelicals and Christian nationalism

      OpinionWendell Griffen

    • Baptists under Nazism and Baptists amid America’s current political crisis: a call to ‘disruption’

      OpinionKristopher Norris

    • Sitting in someone else’s chair

      OpinionBrett Younger

    • ‘Have you found Jesus yet?’ The peddling preacher and the pauper

      OpinionCorey Fields

    • Are we finally ready to learn from Glenn Hinson, one of our Baptist prophets?

      OpinionAlan Bean

    • The case of Rodney Reed: A call to abolish state-sanctioned lynching known as capital punishment

      OpinionWendell Griffen and Lauri Umansky

    • Sorry, Jeremiah, but our children’s (and grandchildren’s) teeth ARE set on edge

      OpinionBill Leonard

    • Muhammad appears in top 10 baby name list for the first time

      CuratedHuffPost

    • How the ‘extreme abstinence’ of the purity movement created a sense of shame in evangelical women

      CuratedThe Conversation

    • Palestinians in Bethlehem look beyond religious tourism

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • SMU sued for severing ties with church

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • David Bentley Hart’s polemic against the alleged doctrine of eternal hell

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Georgia’s legislature endorsed Bible classes. Twice. Why aren’t schools teaching them?

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • House Speaker Pelosi rebukes reporter: ‘Don’t mess with me’

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Holt Street Baptist commemorates bus boycott anniversary, converts former church to museum

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • What does a fair trade logo actually mean?

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Resurgence of nationalism is a ‘setback for humanity’, says German theologian Jürgen Moltmann

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • How bad theology makes the opioid crisis worse

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Refugee ministries fight new resettlement requirement

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • At Bishop Barber’s NC church, Pete Buttigieg works to woo black voters

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Former U.S. President Carter hospitalized in Georgia with urinary tract infection

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Dallas pastor’s book sheds light on painful discussions that led Wilshire Baptist to embrace LGBT members

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Seven years after his story went viral, a former Baptist minister continues to advocate for the LGBTQ community

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • How many Americans believe Trump is anointed by God?

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • The generous gospel of Mayor Pete

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Advent calendars have exploded with gift-worthy options

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Thanksgiving reveals more about us than about 17th century events

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Is the Bible right? Newly discovered fossils show snakes had legs

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Burnsville pastor resigns amid allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships in past

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Wayne Grudem changes mind about divorce in cases of abuse

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Sarah Sanders says she’s ‘been called’ to run for office, considering 2022 run for governor

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    • Rick Perry says Trump is the ‘chosen one’ sent ‘to do great things’

      Curated

      Exclude from home pageCurated Content

    Conversations that Matter.

    © 2019 Baptist News Global. All rights reserved.

    Want to share a story? We hope you will! Read our republishing, terms of use and privacy policies here.

    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • RSS