America’s Idolatry
Idolatry: the worship of a physical object as a god
Enough of being nice!
Enough of trying not to offend!
Enough of the lies, the deflections and the excuses!
Nineteen sweet, beautiful, innocent, and gifted, young boys and girls, plus two of their heroic teachers were tragically and senselessly shot to death this week by an 18-year-old in possession of not one, but two, AR-15 riffles. It defies all rational logic that our nation cannot come to a consensus on meaningful gun reform.
America is an idolatrous state in its worship of guns.
I heard recently that there are 60 million more guns on the streets in America today than there are citizens of this country.[1] Stop trying to convince me that guns aren’t the problem. Stop telling me that you are so concerned about pro-life that you will overturn 50 years of precedent to tell a woman what she may or may not do with her own body and yet do nothing about the slaughter 19 ten-year-olds, filled with the breath of life. Stop with the lies about supporting mental health programs and building local collaborations when the former administration called for a $9.5 billion cut to HHS’s discretionary budget in 2021 and a $1.6 trillion cut over 10 years from mandatory health care spending.[2] Stop insisting that we need more guns, more security officers, and build schools like fortresses, when most of our systems can’t afford new books and too many teachers have to purchase, with their own money, crayons, scissors and construction paper for their students.
The idolatry of the political right was on full display immediately after the massacre on Tuesday when the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, was asked whether an 18-year-old should be able to purchase a gun or not. Abbott said that the ability for an 18-year-old to purchase a “long gun” had been on the books for “sixty years” in his state and there had never been “an episode like this.” The Governor went on to ask: “Why is it that for the majority of those sixty years, we did not have school shootings?”[3]
A simple answer: sixty years ago, you could not purchase an assault rifle! “Arma Lite first developed the AR-15 in the late 1950s as a military rifle, but had limited success in selling it. In 1959 the company sold the design to Colt. In 1963, the U.S. military selected Colt to manufacture the automatic rifle that soon became standard issue for U.S. troops in the Vietnam War. It was known as the M-16. Armed with that success, Colt ramped up production of a semiautomatic version of the M-16 that it sold to law enforcement and the public, marketed as the AR-15. When Colt's patents for the AR-15 expired in the 1970s, other manufacturers began making similar models.”[4]
Governor Abbott seemed to forget on Tuesday that some 56 years ago in the state of Texas, America experienced the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman at that time. On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death the previous night, Charles Whitman, a Marine veteran, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, and then opened fire indiscriminately on people on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 14 people, including an unborn child. Whitman had displayed mental health struggles and violent outbursts before the event. Could there have been a different outcome if the state or nation had a red flag law in place?
Nowhere else in the world is there a political group that holds on to the idolatry of guns than the Republican party. Conservatives have absolutely no interest in fixing the problem. Republicans don’t care about the innocent loss of life. It is abundantly clear that they do not believe what they say for their actions speak louder than their words. What do Republicans care about? Power, control, and staying in office.
The top twenty United States Senators who have received the most funding from the National Rifle Association are all Republicans. Here are the top five lawmakers who received the most funding from the NRA — either directly or indirectly – over the course of their political careers.
· Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah Republican: $13,645,387
· Sen. Richard Burr, North Carolina Republican: $6,987,380
· Sen. Thom Tillis, North Carolina Republican: $5,611,796
· Sen. Roy Blunt, Missouri Republican: $4,555,722
· Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican: $3,688,078
Ernst told the New York Times last Tuesday that before she decided on gun reforms she needed to first better
"understand the circumstances" of the Texas school shooting![5]
I suggest that one action that needs to be taken immediately in hopes of forever destroying the idolatrous addiction that our nation has for guns is to publicly display what the crime scene looks like after a gunman has used an AR-15. Expose the darkness to the light.
Dr Heather Sher, who is affiliated with Broward Health Medical Center, wrote an op-ed published for The Atlantic, titled 'What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns,' that what sets AR-15 bullets apart from handgun ammunition is that they destroy the tissue surrounding the path of the bullet through an organ, usually causing fatal bleeding in the patient.[6]
The bullet from an AR-15 rifle leaves the muzzle at three times the speed of a handgun bullet. That means it has plenty of energy to “distribute” inside the body upon collision. It can disintegrate three inches of leg bone, turning it to “dust” according to Donald Jenkins, a trauma surgeon at the University of Texas Health Science Center. “The liver looks like a jello mold that’s been dropped on the floor,” if hit by the same bullet, Jenkins says. The exit would be the size of an orange.[7]
Because the AR-15 fires almost without recoil, a shooter can inflict more damage with multiple bullets accurately hitting the same target. “The gun barely moves. You can sit there: boom boom boom. Reel off shots as fast as you can move your finger,” Denver Health trauma surgeon and Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery editor Ernest Moore wrote for the blog Wired.[8]
Is it any wonder that the parents of these nineteen children were asked to supply their DNA in hopes that the authorities could identify the bodies? Can you imagine what horror the parents have gone through this week when seeing their lifeless children for the first time: a leg shattered to dust, a liver that looks like jello, or an exit wound the size of an orange.
As horrible a suggestion I am making, I am still convinced that displaying these graphic images, and educating the public on the brutal force of these weapons, sixty senators might find immediate solutions to the problems.
I am not the first person to suggest America’s idolatry with guns and the Second Amendment. Nor will I be the last. The banning of the AR-15 should not be a partisan issue. Every constitutionally guaranteed right that we are blessed to enjoy comes with responsibilities. Even our right to free speech is not limitless. Second Amendment gun rights must respect the same boundaries.
Martin Luther addressed idolatry saying: “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God, your functional savior.” We are living in challenging times. What will be our witness? Will we stand idlily by and do nothing while more children die in senseless mass shootings? Or will we finally stand up, speak out, and demand from our lawmakers sensible gun reform?
Only then, will America’s idol start to be destroyed, and the victims of Uvalde, Buffalo, Boulder, Orlando, Parkland, Las Vegas, Aurora Colorado, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, will not have died in vain.
[1] BBC News, May 26, 2022
[2] https://budget.house.gov/publications/report/president-s-2021-health-and-human-services-budget
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRWyiUF7ySw
[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/02/28/588861820/a-brief-history-of-the-ar-15
[5] https://people.com/politics/the-lawmakers-who-receive-the-most-funding-from-nra/
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/
[7] “What happens when AR-15 rifle bullets tear through the human body”, by Chris Smith, June 21, 2016
[8] www.wired.com
