The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.- NRA Press Conference, Dec. 21, 2012
“Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man), Albrecht Durer
“If I’d only had a gun….?” – Jesus of Nazareth, First Century CE.
2012 NRA Christmas Message – Part 1
Views from the Edge 
Gun safe did not exist in the world of rural America I grew up in, The closest we ever saw of even semi-automatic, is five shells in a chamber and they were new at the time, and if it was a shotgun for bird hunting, two of the ‘holders had to be blocked off’.. The idea of safety at the time, was a gun was never stored loaded, and the ammunition was stored in an entirely different place – well out of the reach of children. This current culture is ‘nuts’ Saw a statistic that since the episode of Newtown, CT, 100 people have died from gunshots in this country.. One week later, but no one counts the cost of those individual deaths…. And there is quadruple the grief there.
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Thanks, Karin, for the memory and the expanded view on the 100 others who have died of gun violence since the horror at Newtown.
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I suppose there’s logic in their response, except for the error of their basic premise. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Ah — the basic premise – “the bad guy will have a gun.” Of course that’s their basic premise — fortunes depend on it.
What would Jesus say? My guess – the only way to stop a person with a gun is to keep guns out of his or her hands. And what might bring that about? – loving concern for community and justice. What would reason say? Jesus was one smart leader! Too bad so many have distorted his message.
And if one must target shoot? I remember enjoying my BB gun in Vermont until they passed the bottle-and-can-return law and there were no more targets to shoot. Imagine how different things might have been if Nancy Lanza’s automatic rifle had been stored under lock and key at the club where she did her target shooting.
I’m not good at praying, (though I think I’m OK at chatting), But I’m in favor of bombarding the universe with prayers to overcome our gun culture.
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Mona, Keep praying. “What would Jesus say?” I think Jesus, like all the Hebrew prophets on whose teachings he relied for wisdom, would have nothing to say about the rush to practical remedies. Instead, he would go after the culture of violence, the spiritual and practical bankruptcy of security by means of force, and the call to live vulnerably as the only way to disarm the principalities and powers. Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, Gabby Gifford, Stephen the Martyr are the flesh-and-blood words Jesus might say.
Keep your BB gun in locked up at the target range. Or, if you really feel an irrepressible urge to shoot something, shoot a rubber ducky in your bathtub…and then…call the plumber.
Safe trip and Merry Christmas.
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Never haave I heard such callous respone to an event that has torn the mournful hearts of so many.
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I have never heard such an iresponsible respone to a very sorow filled event. The NRA is totally out of touch with reality.
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Jim, Just when a few of us began to indulge the illusion that the NRA would join the rest of us in addressing the horror, we get more of the same. It’s the same insanity that led the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to continue stockpiling nuclear weapons when each could have blown the world up 15 times over. More is NOT better. The NRA lives in a parallel universe.
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