By Bill Leonard
In recent days a series of unnatural disasters spread across the American landscape, extending from populous Boston to the small town of West, Texas, even winding through the power-laden corridors of the United States Senate.
On Patriots’ Day, April 15, two terrorist-generated bombs exploded in Copley Square, throwing the 116th Boston Marathon into chaos, killing three people (among them an 8-year-old child) and maiming more than 260 persons, many enduring the amputation of limbs torn to shreds by nails and other fragments of body-piercing shrapnel.
Barely five days later, a media-electrified nation was within earshot of gun battles involving the two suspected terrorist/brothers and police, firefights that left one brother dead and another seriously wounded, but not before they murdered a security guard and wounded another.
The surviving 19-year-old suspect was apprehended, but Boston and its closest suburbs were literally locked down for an entire day.
By April 17, the sense of national disaster widened when the Texas town of West exploded amid a fire at the local fertilizer plant, killing 14 people, many of whom were first responders, injuring over 200 citizens and leveling houses, businesses, churches, as well as at least one nursing facility.
In its most recent safety report, the plant’s management acknowledged the danger of a fire, but seemed not to anticipate the possibility of a related explosion. The actual cause of that fire and resulting blast is yet to be determined.
The focus of extensive media coverage, these two devastating events were in no way “natural disasters,” or “acts of God,” — itself a theologically problematic phrase. Rather, they were unnatural catastrophes, produced directly or indirectly by human behavior or choices, but beyond the control of the many victims who happened to be on site when the tragedies struck.
While the Texas episode was inadvertent, it parallels similar calamities in coal mine and toxic factories that impacted nearby populations. The intentionality of the Boston bombings immediately added them to the list of similar nation-galvanizing unnatural disasters that include 9/11, and shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, the Sikh Temple, Tucson, Aurora and Newtown.
These moments of national trauma redefined life for families and communities in ways that could never have been anticipated, reminders of our individual and collective vulnerability. At any moment in locales, mundane or iconic, we are often defenseless, not merely to unpredictable occurrences in the natural world — floods, tornados, hurricanes — but also from the impact of manufactured danger, intentional or not.
This reality was further illustrated on April 17, when the U.S. Senate voted 54-46 to reject an amendment sponsored by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey extending firearm background checks to gun shows and Internet purchases while exempting them from sales between friends or family members.
Although a majority of the senators voted for the amendment, they failed to produce the filibuster-proof 60-vote margin required of amendments for that specific day. Forty-one Republicans, including Richard Burr, North Carolina’s legislative back bencher, voted against the amendment, as did five Democrats including Majority Leader Harry Reid who changed his vote to “no” to preserve the possibility of reconsideration.
From a theological perspective, the vote made enablers of those senators who supported a group of American individuals and agencies obsessed with firearms, exploiting the Second Amendment to justify an idolatrous fixation with guns themselves.
Such behavior continues to recall the book of Exodus when Moses, returning from Sinai with the “tablets of the Covenant” in hand, discovers the Israelites worshiping “a golden calf.” When questioned regarding how this could be, Aaron, the prophet-in-charge, offers a timelessly tragic and ironic response: “We threw the gold in the fire and out came this calf” (Ex. 32:24).
Aaron’s self-justification pales when compared to those of the senators. Ignoring polls showing some 90 percent of Americans in favor of the amendment, their Aaronic excuses perpetuated such bromides as: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” “We don’t enforce the gun laws we already have” or, “The only way to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.”
With Moses-like fury, Republican broadcaster Joe Scarborough denounced senatorial enablers as “idiots” and “gutless wonders” whose votes permitted “rapists, criminals and terrorists” to continue to acquire weapons without the slightest background scrutiny.
Yet, even if the Boston terrorists are found to have armed themselves without restraint, it will probably make little difference to those senators who oppose changes in firearm policies. Given that reality, churches, families and individuals had best prepare for additional unnatural disasters, anytime, anywhere.