[Vision2020] Guns and religion

[Ron Force]

Excerpts below, full article here:
http://crosscut.com/2013/01/03/religion/112289/gun-violence-and-religion-who-nra-calling-good-guy/


Guns and faith: Who is the NRA calling a 'good guy'?
The Christian religious tradition allows for none of this self-congratulatory delusion that we are the good people, assured of a special standing. Or that we should be toting guns everywhere without limitations.
by Anthony B. Robinson
...National Rifle Association President, Wayne LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The answer — why didn’t I see this coming? — is more guns. The answer is arm the good guys.
LaPierre only puts bluntly, and succinctly, a world view that is now commonplace in American culture: that the world can be divided into the good guys and bad guys. This is stock-in-trade of the movie industry and the genre of film made by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and countless others. After 9/11 it became the framing rhetoric of then President Bush who spoke often of Americans as “good and compassionate.”...
...For Christians the world does not divide between the good guys and the bad guys. The Apostle Paul in his great summa of the Christian faith, his Letter to the Romans, insisted — quoting the Old Testament — that, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one.” And that, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Note the key words, “no one” and “all.”
As a moral system Christianity is built around the idea of human sinfulness — the conviction that not just some people, but all people, have a built-in tendency toward evasion, corrosive self-interest and self-deception. And not just some, but all people are violent — at least potentially...
...Instead of assuring us that we are the good guys, who should have guns, this hard faith and moral tradition would caution us to be very, very careful about claiming to be the good guys and very, very cautious about  taking the power of life and death into our own hands and homes. We are all — at least potentially — violent people.
Given this, you don’t sprinkle fantastically lethal weapons around — as our society now does — nearly as freely as candy. You don’t encourage ordinary people to stockpile weapons, as we now do, in private homes. You limit access to those who have been given a particular role and responsibility, like police and military, and you hold them legally accountable for the use of such lethal power.
The real world is not like a B movie, divided clear as day between the goods guys and the bad guys. Rather, the world is divided between the people who know their own sinfulness and potential for violence — and who therefore treat guns with great respect and severe limits — and people who imagine that because they are good guys it’s OK — even imperative — that they are armed to the teeth.
After nearly ever shooting rampage we hear the puzzled lament from neighbors or acquaintances of the shooter, “Yes, he was a bit of a loner, but he seemed nice enough, he was courteous, friendly. He seemed like a good guy.”
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