Guns in America

                On Friday of last week, a gunman opened fire in a midnight showing of the movie “The Dark Knight Rises”. Twelve people lost their lives…people who went into that movie theater that night excited to see another Batman blockbuster hit, never expecting in a million years that they would die just minutes later in a gun massacre that made international news. Twelve families and hundreds of loved ones were taken by TOTAL surprise when that call came in and woke them from their sleep, just after midnight. What a terrible, terrible tragedy. And it doesn’t stop there. The total number injured was fifty eight.

            Soon after, the buzz of social media began and people start expanding upon each other’s opinions. I ran across this article by Michael Moore, “It's the Guns - But We All Know, It's Not Really the Guns”. In response to the article, I would like to say a few things.

I would like to stand publically and say that I believe Americans should have the right to bear arms. I also believe that we could take better care of each other as a society. Way too many people die every year to gun injuries. I agree with Mr. Moore…there have been many terrible atrocities throughout the history of mankind, and there will surely always be those types of events as long as we are man, but the issue discussed here is guns, specifically the ones that murder. We need to reduce the number of deaths due to guns, not just in this country, but in the world. Period.

He went on to make some good points about the destructive nature of Americans, which I agree with, and to give statistics that supported how the US is way above the normal in gun deaths per year. Here is the summation:

“That means the United States is responsible for over 80 percent of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well, then, why us?”

  This is a great question Michael. I will get back to this in a minute.

            Mr. Moore also said, about the slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, "I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the real truth: "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."”

Technically, I would say guns don’t kill people Mr. Moore...criminals do. Criminals don’t just use guns because they are legal and easy to get, but they use them because they can have power. I believe that making laws to restrict those individuals who will abide the law from owning and gun - a law that criminals won’t follow anyway - doesn’t seem to be a good solution at all.

 I asked myself this...”If someone in that theater would have had a gun in their waistline, and shot the killer in the head after his first 5 shots went off, they could have probably saved many lives...then what would the conversation be?”

 I bet the parents of the children that were killed would have been thankful for this armed citizen who took action to stop this movie theater killer before he shot 1000 bullets in the place and killed and wounded 70 people. A good man with a handgun and proper training in that movie theater would have been celebrated if he would have stopped this atrocity. Heck, our country would have placed a crack-dealing, pistol-whipping thug in the limelight if he would have saved lives…but criminals don't usually care about saving lives, and they never care what the laws are. They will still find guns no matter what the law says, and we will need a way to stop them. The responsibility that lies with the government here seems to be to protect you from the wrong type of people collecting firearms in the first place, without limiting your freedom to own a firearm to protect your family?

I am not really sure how I feel about Michael’s conclusion that we Americans are “good killers”. I guess that’s one way of looking at it. I think technology has made the world smaller to humanity, and methods of accomplishing the tasks at hand have changed or “evolved” over the last 100 years. Now when our government needs to use a gun to murder another human being, they can spare a US citizen’s life, and remotely do it instead (insert sarcastic smirk here). I agree, “It is madness”. The real problem is not in how we have advance our killing methods, it is that our governing bodies lack nobility, courage, leadership, righteousness, morals, and values. We shouldn’t be killing anyone at all! What gives us the right?

But in today’s society, the real bush we all beat around is - Who is to blame?

.....the government for not regulating guns?.....the gun manufacturers?.....wal-mart or k-mart for selling bullets?......the bullet manufacturers?..... how about the guy who did the terrible criminal act…James Holmes?.....God?.....The Devil?.....Mankind…..? Any good clear blame in any of those places? Well, to have blame would indicate that someone failed to do their job.  So who do we blame?

According to Wikipedia.com, AND I AM AWARE OF THE NATURE OF WIKIPEDIA and the ABILITY TO EDIT, we have had an estimated 10 massacres in this country since 1970. Forty two years total…ten massacres on US soil. That’s an impressive number in my mind, considering the population of people in those forty two years. What alarms me is that eight of the ten massacres have happened since 1991. So, by the numbers, society is clearly killing more in the last 20 years. That’s 80% of the massacres on US soil in the last forty two years has occurred in the last twenty one years. Now back to Mr. Moore's question..... why?

We all have an opinion. I agree with Mr. Moore here too…people have always killed one another…if not with guns, then with spears and swords, and if not with swords, then with fists.                           

            But back to the main point…It’s not guns fault that we choose to kill, it’s ours. We have entirely too much accessibility to guns, and we are not mature enough as a civilization to have “the power to take life” at our disposal. I don’t believe that we respect guns as much as we should, nor do I believe we ever have. The founders of this country had to know how to shoot for survival, and guns have played a huge part of our history, but our ancestors knew something we have forgotten as a culture…the responsibility of owning a gun is great. It is a weapon not an accessory, and it is a matter of life and death.

It is the responsibility of the government to keep us safe, but not dictate over us. The people who qualify to sale firearms should require that anyone that wants a gun should have to wait one year before you can receive a gun of any kind...this way, the people applying can be fully screened. You should have to take classes, tests, and should have serious requirements to show stability. I know there’s a couple billion being wasted somewhere in a government program that meets once a month and never uses real names that could go towards this. It would seem to me that the unstable or criminal types would get noticed through a “process” of a year. This whole idea that you can walk into a pawn shop and walk out with a .40 caliber GLOCK is ridiculous. We have teenagers with regular access to guns, but no access to guidance at all. Stop selling auto and semi-auto weapons, and reserve them for military only. Allow citizens to have a rifle, a shotgun, or handguns, and stop allowing anyone to purchase weapons that are for war.

Again, I will state for the record, I believe we should have the right to own guns to protect our homes.

I think the more important question is “who are we so afraid” that we need 300 million guns in our homes? Maybe we are afraid of our government. Maybe we can see how bad this country is getting. Maybe we just want to be able to sleep at night and know that if someone breaks in and wants to rape our women and kill our children, we have an option that will stop them.

The real issue is not that we are afraid; the real issue is that we should be. This world is slowly declining, getting worse generation by generation. We are complacent, self-entitled, lazy, arrogant, envious, and more self-righteous than we have ever been in history. Maybe we are secretly afraid because we all know we are due justice and judgment for our wicked ways, and we need guns to feel more secure. Who knows, but I think the people who make money off the guns are most likely the real contributors to the problem. They are the ones forcing as many guns into the marketplace, however they can, to profit…if that means paying off government, then they chalk it up as the price of business. It’s always about money and that is a very sad truth. They don’t care what happens to the guns once they get sold, even if it ends up in a pawn shop in Colorado.

I am in favor of being able to own firearms because I think we are going to need them, just as the original settlers needed them.  I think a time will soon come when that is all that will protect us from the trouble this country is headed for if we don’t start focusing on the people, and not on the money, and not on disagreeing just because we want to be right.

I will leave you with this thought…..laws that restrict abiding people from defending themselves, which criminals will not follow, are a bad idea. What if our guns get taken away by laws, and the criminals still have theirs? I want the right to protect my family, and I want people who sale guns to be more responsible, the people who make guns to be more responsible, the people who purchase guns to be more responsible, and the people who shoot guns to be held more responsible.

God bless America and her people 

Don't Judge Me

Every 24 hours, 156,000 people die in the U.S.

That is roughly 2 people every second of every day of the year. We all know that death is not bias…it can come to any of us at any given moment. It can strip us down, it can steal away a piece of our soul when we lose loved ones, and if death comes for you today, all that you worked for, strived for, to leave as your legacy, would be gone within 5 generations, forever forgotten to the world of tomorrow. So we should agree that death is a very serious concern to think about. But the number one fear in America is not death…it is public speaking.

I have pondered this and reveled at this for some time, and the conclusion/opinion I have come to is as follows:

We are not afraid of speaking....we are afraid of being judged…

but why?

Let’s first look at how we feel about judgment to establish a base line.

Most of us know in our hearts that“wrongs” should be dealt with justly. We all have a sense ingrained in us that judgment for wrongs is “good”. We (humanity) set up judicial systems toregulate and punish criminals because we all know it to be right to do so. I mean, we all think if someone murders or steals, they should be punished, right? Justice keeps morality relevant among people, and we all know morality matters, whether we argue for it or not.

Most people will tell you that they try to be “good” people, and this is for a real reason…because we know “good” is just, and “bad” deserves justice. Judgment is a part of our soul. It is in our DNA as natural and good. So why is public speaking the number one fear in America and not death? I think this is because judgment from peers is “today”, in the moment, and at the forefront of our lives, but not many of us think about being judged at the time of our death...Which is quite curious really…Is that because we think that when we die, we won’t be judged? Or maybe we think death is a long way off? Death seems a bit distant to most people I guess, but public ridicule can be right now, today, and that scares most folks to death (no pun intended).

This leads me to my next point. I spoke this week about judgment, and sin, with several people who seemed to think that they were better or worse off than other people based on the “amount of sin” and “wrongs” they had done. They spoke as if God has an on-going tally and is keeping up with sins by (metaphorically) placing black marks beside our names in the book of life. The more marks, the worse the judgment. I heard sentences like, “You don’t know all the bad things I have done”, or “God knows who the really bad people are and who have just sinned a small amount”. These people were applying our judicial system to God’s hand of justice, but failing to see one key flaw in their logic…but I will come back to that point in a minute.

The logic behind their perspective supports the following thought then....

- Hitler killed millions of people, not directly with his own hand, but directly enough for him to be held accountable to a judge, so he is a “worse sinner” than someone like a child who has committed only a few minor sins, like telling a small lie –

Now we can agree that most children have told at least one lie, or maybe taken something from someone else-irrespective of its value- but these are considered the, “everybody has done them” sins, so they are less “bad” by our culture’s standards of justice. I hear people all the time say things like, “Everybody has lied at some point” or “everybody has taken a pen or something small at some point or another”…right?

The problem with this logic is simple…who makes the rules? Do you get to make the rules of what’s bad and what’s good? Do I get to make them? Does Hitler make the rules? What do we base our standard on, and are every one's standards set the same? Consider this dilemma further… someone who never lies might consider a lie to be atrocious and unforgivable...a terrible injustice. On the other hand, if you have lied before, or do so on occasion, then you might be one of the ones who says, “well, everybody lies sometimes, that just makes me human”.You see the problem? I mean Hitler had a nation convinced that his rules were the best out there, and that what he was doing was good. Therein lies the problem…we know justice is good, but we need an absolute moral code with a serious set of rules with real justice to regulate all the people with all the varying moral ethics.

You see, our culture has slowly molded our humanity, and that has caused a recession in our view of sin. Now, we judge sins like the courts judge crimes. Of course, this is a natural self-righteous response because we want to feel like “better” people than a murdered or a liar or a thief or a “real” sinner. But when we make our own moral rules based on our standards of morality, which are much too low to promote a perfect world, we will always favor ourselves and will be skewed by what our culture tells us is OK, and not OK.

The world tells us that some sins are of lighter “value” than others because culture has grown to accept certain sins as “normal”. It has become natural to think of sin as having "levels" so we can allocate the proper judgment to the crime.

Now back to Hitler… The above assessment of sin, based on our moral standards, means that someone like Hitler is a worse person than my 9 year old daughter, whose only sin might be telling a few lies....but this is simply NOT true. The Bible says sin is sin, and a holy and righteous God cannot look upon sin, so in his eyes, we are all the same....we are all EQUALLY guilty...PERIOD. Sinners...PERIOD. There are no "better" sinners than others...there are only sinners who have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus and are willingto turn from sin and follow Jesus, and sinners who refuse God’s grace and choose to continue to live life for themselves and for their sin.

We need to remember that ALL of humanity is broken in God’s eyes because “ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” - Romans 3:23. The term ALL literally means “all created humanity” here, and HAVE SINNEDin the sentence notes that you either have, or have not…there is only one or the other. It doesn’t matter how many sins, how bad of sin, how hurtful, how petty….sin is sin and even one sin is enough for a perfect, holy, and righteous God to be required in His perfection to judge you perfectly for your crime against Him. One sin = criminal, and criminal means justice. He must judge sin this way because He is perfect and holy, and a “good” judge must judge sin with a standard of perfect morality. “For the wages of sin is death…”– Roman 6:23

But, the important thing is that there is hope, and God has provided a way for ALL the sinners to be forgiven.“…but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord” – Roman 6:23.

He sent His son, Jesus, the only sinless soul ever, to carry all the judgment for all the sin of all time on His shoulders. God literally became a man, and was murdered as a sinless man for crimes He never committed, to take the judgment for our sins, so that we might have a way to become clean in His sight.

The bottom line about sin is simple….One sin makes a sinner…but God loves All of us sinners, and killed His son for ALL, and laid His wrath for ALL the sins of ALL humanity on His Son's shoulders that we might ALL have redemption from this sin that we are born into...the choice is ours, the gift is HIS.

- “For God so loved THE WORLD (this means ALL THE PEOPLE OF ALL TIME) that He sent His only begotten Son, that WHOSOEVER (this means anyone, everyone, and ALL, no matter your crimes, who chose to believe) believes in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life” – John 3:16

It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, how “bad” you think you are, or what you think you are worthy of, God will forgive you. If you make the conscious decision that you want to turn from sin, deep inside your heart, and truly repent, and you ask Jesus to come into your heart and reveal the truth to you, He will show Himself to you, and what you will soon know is truly miraculous.... Please give special attention to that word “miraculous”, because I do not use it lightly.

May God bless us all for we are ALL in need of a savior and He came to show us He loves us and to offer salvation to those who want it.

God bless