There is a way to reduce the anger and polarization around America’s gun debate by using tenets of faith, according to Michael Austin, author of God and Guns in America.
“We really can reduce gun violence in the United States while actually protecting the rights of responsible gun owners in ways that are true to the Second Amendment,” Austin said during a recent episode of Denver Seminary’s “Engage360” podcast.
Michael Austin
“As Christians, we have special reasons to do so given our views about human dignity and human beings made in God’s image. Even though there is violence in Scripture, in general it’s something God rejects. For a lot of different reasons, we are called to peace, even if in a fallen world,” said Austin, a philosophy professor at Eastern Kentucky University.
Austin explained that his academic and personal interest in the issues of gun ownership and violence emanate from his larger scholarly focus on the connections between character development and the common good. Another lure to the topic was his upbringing in a home in which firearms and hunting were the norm.
Subsequent research into Christian attitudes in the gun debate uncovered serious misconceptions in both camps, he said. “When we normally talk gun violence in America, we think of views like ‘abolish the Second Amendment’ at one extreme and unlimited rights, regardless of the cost, on the other.”
A broader reading of Scripture, Austin said, led him to lean even more into his previously held pacifist positions on gun violence more than on gun control.
Don Payne
Moderator Don Payne, an administrator and theology professor at Denver Seminary, noted the issue of gun violence seems to generate more passion and touch more lives than the issue of gun control.
“Gun violence is a lot broader,” Payne said, because it includes homicides by gun, defensive gun use, accidental shootings and suicide by gun. Physical injuries and psychological trauma are also significant consequences of violent firearm use.
“The issues related to gun violence don’t immediately take us to the gun control question,” he explained.
The issue is urgent because gun-induced deaths are on the rise nationally, Austin explained. In 2014, 32,000 such fatalities were reported by the Centers for Disease Control, compared to 47,000 in 2022.
“That’s alarming. And it’s not just mass shootings, it’s all these other things,” he said.
In fact, many people are frequently surprised to learn that mass shootings represent “a small fraction” of firearm deaths annually in the U.S., he continued. Equally shocking for some is that suicide accounts for roughly 60% of gun deaths in the U.S.
“That changes the focus of the discussion and suggests a lot of things we could do that aren’t related to gun control necessarily — things that we can do policy-wise, but also as a church. As followers of Jesus and just as human beings, that gives us a special burden” to help those who are lonely and depressed, he said.
Another helpful response could come from educational efforts around firearm safety and storage needed to protect children from gun injuries and deaths, he continued. “There are some good things we could do in the law, but broadly speaking we can do a lot as the church of Jesus Christ to reduce gun violence that doesn’t have anything to do with the public policy debates, necessarily.”
“Many people point out it’s not a gun problem, it’s a sin problem. I want to argue it’s both.”
Christians also can play a vital part in addressing the hostility and polarization in American culture that leads to rampant gun violence, Austin said. “This goes to things about character formation, spiritual formation, the presence of anger and how that leads to violence. Many people point out it’s not a gun problem, it’s a sin problem. I want to argue it’s both.”
The work also must address behaviors such as child abuse and other underlying causes of individual trauma, he added. “They’re more apt to act in violent ways because of things internal to them and things external to them. What can we do to help people and where that’s not their reaction?”
But another layer to the challenge is that many of those wielding firearms are Christians, Austin said. “There are these pressures to see other Americans, even other Christians, as our enemies, rather than just fellow Americans and fellow Christians we have disagreements with. But as Christians, empathy is vital because it’s the heart of all these important Christian virtues, such as compassion.”