Don’t Look Away

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre famously said after the Newtown shooting in 2012. That’s a great one liner, but is it true? The answer to that question is: yes, no, and we don’t know.

In mid-June, Ohio became the 23rd state to allow people to carry a concealed firearm without a permit or training.

The change, signed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine, came after dozens of witnesses testified before lawmakers with an arsenal of studies and data supporting their respective sides. Gun-control advocates pointed to analyses and data indicating such a move will lead to more gun crime and violence. Yet, at the same time, proponents touted other research and figures showing that it will not affect or may even reduce gun violence.

What are the facts?

The Cleveland News points how research into the effects of permitless-carry gun laws “is relatively inconsistent, and no firm conclusions can be drawn from it yet.” This by Andrew Morral, the leader of Gun Policy in America, a RAND Corporation initiative to understand the effects of gun policies. He goes on to say, “There are a few new studies specifically looking at permitless-carry gun laws, but I think they too represent fairly uncertain results.” Such uncertainty isn’t necessarily because states experienced little or no effect from a change to permitless-carry. “It may have large effects,” he said. “It’s just that strong research is not yet available to draw firm conclusions.”

Chalkboard Battles

Years ago I was a football coach. If I had expertise—which I did, but not much—it was on the defensive side of the ball. Back then, in the 70s, football coaches loved the chalkboard. We coaches would be in a room together and we’d draw up plays. The coaches on the offense’s side would diagram a play and boldly proclaim: “We do this and that and then we also add that and this, and result is that this play will gain yards every time.” Then it would be our turn with the chalk: “You do this and that and that and this and then we move this guy here and that guy there and we do this maneuver and that move and we nail you every time.”

At the end of the session we’d agree that the winning side was whoever had the chalk last!

So if you are on the gun-rights side then when you have the chalk you draw up the data to support your position. Those on the gun-control side can counter with research that means they win. And of course, the bottom line in today’s world is that whoever wins is right. So, who’s winning? And who’s losing?

Football’s Bottomline

What we coaches understood that seems to be missing for both sides of most every issue confronting us today, including gun violence, is that we were on the same side, the same team. When Friday night came, we were all working to win, and we were in it together. And if we lost; we all lost.

Therefore, I fear that trying to convince anyone of anything by using data is mostly a waste of time. We need something much more earthy and human! I honestly think that this was God’s idea in Jesus—send humankind something with flesh on and they’ll follow that someone even if the experiment ends with suffering and death.

Emmett Till

In 1955, when Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley heard the news that her only child had been kidnapped in Money, Mississippi, tortured, shot, wrapped in a barbed wire attached to a 75-pound fan and then thrown in the Tallahatchie River, she insisted that authorities send his body home to Chicago.

When she went to the train station to see the remains of her 14-year-old son, she collapsed. “Lord, take my soul,” she cried, according to a 2003 interview with The Washington Post.

Emmett Till’s body was swollen beyond recognition. His teeth were missing. His ear was severed. And his eye was hanging out. The only thing that identified him was a ring. Some of the children in Uvalde Texas were so badly maimed that they had to be identified by their clothing or through DNA testing. Imagine being a parent of one of those children and having to endure your own inner cheek being swabbed so that the attending coroner could release to you the body of your 9-year-old child. That’s human at the most gut-wrenching, earthy level.

In her grief and outrage, Emmett’s mother called the Chicago Defender, one of the country’s leading black newspapers. She called Ebony and Jet magazines, telling reporters she wanted the world to see the barbaric act committed against her son by white men in Mississippi.

Don’t Look Away!

Then the mother did something that would change history: She asked for an open casket at his funeral.

“I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till,” Till-Mobley said.

At a church on the South Side of Chicago, Emmett Till’s mutilated body would be on display for all to see. Fifty thousand people in Chicago saw Emmett Till’s corpse with their own eyes. When the magazine Jet ran photos of the body, Americans across the country shuddered.

Maybe we need to see for ourselves the effect a bullet has on the body of a flesh and blood human being. I wonder if seeing such a horrific sight would bring on a collective shudder, one that would shake the chalk out of the hands of both sides and force us all as fellow citizens to put our heads together to do something to at least try stop the carnage.

Listen up Senator!

At a town hall meeting in Rock Valley, IA on May 31, 74-year-old Vietnam veteran Joe Gacke explained to Republican Senator Charles Grassley and the rest of the room that he was well-versed in AR-15s and their potential for destruction. Then he made this profound suggestion: “I think every congressman, whether a Democrat or a Republican, should have to go clean up in these schoolrooms, churches or grocery stores, and then maybe, just maybe, something would get done.”

“Winning is Everything,”—Coach Vince Lombardi.

Every single issue that is tearing us apart has the same dynamic: whoever last has the chalk wins. I wonder how we might come to the realization that we are on the same team. We’re human beings. Together we can be better and we can find common ground on every single matter that divides us. The problem is that we have come to believe that to win is to be right, so therefore we play to win at all costs.

I realize what a terrible thing it is to ask an Uvalde parent to release a photo of their mutilated child. It’s too much. It’s just too much. We can’t ask that of any of them. However we could at least try to imagine what that classroom looked like after the gunman had slaughtered 19 children along with two teachers. What we quickly realize is that no matter how hard we try, we can’t even begin to bring up images of that scene. It’s so awful that our minds can’t even go there.

No Coach, Winning is not Everything!

Abortion, gun violence, climate change, gay marriage, and whatever else we might add to the list of matters that matter most, each have one thing in common: opposing sides each doing whatever they can to win.

A Losing Strategy

But losing is the way of Jesus, isn’t it? A little baby, a small following, a failed messiah, an ignoble death, all loses. But look how Jesus lost. He didn’t call on his followers to pick up swords to defend him. He didn’t hurt anyone on his way down. Jesus didn’t mince words in challenging those in authority, but didn’t seek to destroy them. Even the resurrection event is a call to his followers and not a charge against his detractors. Post resurrection, Jesus doesn’t show himself to any of the priestly leadership. Jesus doesn’t walk into Pilate’s bedroom to present himself as the “truth.” Why is that? Because for Jesus, for God, winning is not the goal. Building a community of human beings who will be good and kind and peace-loving and bridge-building and just plain decent is God’s ultimate desire.

Such is God’s losing formula for success!