Some Marmora friends forwarded to me an article from Scientific American that I thought should get more exposure. It has to do with that ever neuralgic issue of gun possession in America. It is more than opinion, which is heavily in favor of things like registration and clip size, notwithstanding the National Rifle and Handgun Association or a certain party in the U.S. Senate. This party was 80 percent for nixing a carefully crafted bipartisan bill while the other party was 80 percent in favor. Voters should remember this.
Meanwhile a Mullica Hill correspondent mailed me a question why priests and bishops comment on gun possession instead of “on what Christ instructed. . . .” Her opinion was that guns and Gospel are so far apart that clergy should confine themselves to “the decline in faith and morals” so evident in our time. To explain what I am sure many ask, I say that traditional and progressive Catholics both admit that the fifth commandment of Moses dictates that we may not kill. This makes the taking of an innocent life an utterly serious matter of morality, something she concedes is in the competence of clergy. Christ, the new Moses, instructs us about a new commandment, that we love, not shoot one another. After all, guns fired by people kill people.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that, according to data for the most recent year for which statistics are available, 2010, 31,672 Americans died by guns, a figure incomparable to other western democracies inasmuch as they outlaw gun possession, unlike us. A 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, says “. . . every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”
This means the persuasion that a gun in the home will enable its safe defense is an illusion. A gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self defense. It really makes you want to go out and buy a handgun. So often we read that a child gets access to a loaded gun, or a gun with the bullets close by, only to slay or wound someone in the family or on the block.
Two professors of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, writing in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, add that another 73,505 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for nonfatal bullet wounds, and 337,960 nonfatal violent crimes were committed with guns. Of the fatalities, fully 61 percent were suicides, and most of the rest were homicides by people who knew each other. In the past 25 years, guns were used in intimate partner homicides more than all other causes combined. This kind of death declines 25 percent in states prohibiting gun ownership by men under domestic restraining orders. Over 80 Americans die every day from guns.
When people die violent gun deaths with such mesmerizing regularity that the shock value is long gone, it is a moral issue. It is not just a police or economic or journalistic issue. It has to do with right and wrong, about which moral leaders must speak and moral people must listen and act. It is not religious people meddling in secular matters where they have no right to interfere. They would be derelict in their moral duty if they remain silent, even if critics say, “I have never heard a more ridiculous article by a priest in my life!”
It is my experience that women arguing for gun rights either fear greatly for their safety or want to excuse the gun their husband or fiancé already has in the house, with all its menacing presence. About the latter, they know the danger. But they feel powerless to try to convince otherwise a man whose macho might react in a hostile way. I wonder if psychologists would call it a kind of Stockholm syndrome. In fact, I wonder if they would say many men have a masculine deficiency disorder in a country that advertizes so incessantly erectile dysfunction pills, the way they clamor for guns as they do.
What would Jesus do? He’d call for repealing the second amendment.
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