Sounds Like God’s Packing Heat

I wonder what sort of gun God carries. Do you suppose He’s the kind of deity who goes for the volume efficiency of an assault weapon, or would He more likely prefer the sure stopping power of a 12-gauge shotgun?

Certainly, the Almighty is packing “some” sort of heat if the proponents of the right to keep and bear arms are any indication. He pops up with telling frequency when they defend their position. As in, “By God, you’ll get my guns only when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.” Or “By God, I’ve got a right to own this arsenal.” Or, my personal favorite: “By God, God and guns is what made this country great.”

As so-called citizen militias take center stage in the national consciousness, I am pessimistic about the prospect for meaningful gun control in this country. If the issue were solely one of logic, it would have been settled long ago. Logically, legislative bodies that seek to revoke the First Amendment every time a rap lyric hurts somebody’s feelings should not be timid about the Second Amendment, under which bodies and lives are routinely shattered. Logically, states should not require a license to drive a car and, in some cases, safety classes to carry a can of mace while providing even the most ignorant among us with access upon demand to deadly force. Logically, the fact that 11-year-olds carry guns in their book bags should inspire in us outrage, not resignation.

Logically.

But logic means nothing. Emotion means all. It is the fuel on which this debate runs. That sacred certainty of some gun-control opponents that they are on the side of the Lord.

Nor is all the emotion smug and self-righteous. Many men I know carry fond, poignant memories of their first firearms. Of stalking through the woods in the chill of a misted morning, going hunting with dad and feeling, for perhaps the first time, a part of his world.

In other Americas, however, misted mornings more often dawn on bullet-riddled corpses. On New Year’s Eve, the darkness exploded like a war zone, and you lay on the floor far from the windows, praying that you wouldn’t become a casualty of some drunkard’s celebration. Two years ago, some punk whose weapon outweighed his manhood stepped in front of my brother-in-law, 33 years old, father of two, and blew his brains out just because.

Contrary to popular myth, the Second Amendment did not guarantee that punk’s access to his weapon. The courts have historically interpreted the right to bear arms to apply to “states” - not individuals - in maintaining armed militias: National Guards, for example. Which means the right of the individual to keep weapons is largely a loose interpretation of the law, not the law itself.

Pity it doesn’t matter. Most Americans “believe” they have the inalienable right to bear arms and so, in a very real sense, court rulings are academic. For better and worse, guns are woven through the fabric of this nation as indelibly and irrevocably as slavery, rock music, cowboys, World War II and Marilyn Monroe.

And you’ll not take guns from their proponents short of civil war. America is under the gun and to some extent will always be. The National Rifle Association may fear, and gun-control advocates may dream, of a gun-free society. This is not going to happen.

But I am reminded of “The Serenity Prayer,” familiar by its much-paraphrased context if not its title: God, give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference.

It is an apt sentiment. It’s time to move off the extreme edges of this ancient debate to which both sides retired long ago. Time for gun-control proponents to quit pretending there is no difference between law-abiding hunters and driveby assassins. Time for gun enthusiasts to accept that it is neither godless nor un-American to deplore the fact that too many of us are armed and extremely dangerous. It is time to find a place in the middle from which to discuss, frankly and in good faith, both misted mornings and murdered children. It is time we found the courage to change the things we can.

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