“The only
way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”
Wayne
LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, offered
that response to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut, last December. It’s the same logic that sent American troops into
Iraq and Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Peace,
the argument runs, is a matter of making sure the right people have the right
weapons and have them in sufficient quantities.
The
Zealots of Jesus’ day agreed. Had the Galileans been more numerous and
better-armed when they attempted an uprising in the temple, Roman rather than
Jewish blood would have stained those sacred stones.
Jesus
takes the argument in another direction and dares to imply that more guns are
not the way to reduce gun violence. His call for repentance does not deal with
individuals re-ordering their private moral menus. “You will all likewise
perish.” Jesus speaks to a communal response of meeting violence with violence
that can have only one predictable result: more violence. To make sure no one
reduces this to a red state/blue state issue (occupants of Jerusalem considered
Galileans a bunch of Tea Party crazies), Jesus takes a local tragedy and likens
it to what will happen when the Romans finally invade with a vengeance: the
siege will end with flattened bodies pinned beneath the blocks of fallen forts.
If you
don’t start to think differently (that’s what the verb “repent” really means)
about the best way to bring about justice you’ll pull your whole world down
around your ears. In other words, the only way to stop a bad guy with a cross
is with a good guy willing to die on a cross.
Out-Gunned,
Doug
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