GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

by Dr. Jim Lewis

The United States is a violent society with crime data suggesting that the South is our most violent region. I grew up in a small central Mississippi town with its own individualistic culture of violence. A nearby neighbor, a Sovereign Citizen forerunner, gave me a tour of his storeroom where he kept a large gun collection complete with a bullet mold. He was certain that at some point he would need to respond to an attack by federal agents. My father kept two old shotguns on his bedroom wall, one whose provenance dated to the Canton, Mississippi, yellow fever epidemic. The guns were rarely touched except on one occasion. One Saturday afternoon my father was walking down a nearby street and a dog bit his leg. He entered our house red-faced and grimly silent, retrieved the 16-gauge shotgun, and headed down the street. The subsequent mayhem was prevented by a smart dog and a brave owner. As my father approached, the dog positioned itself in front of a large bay window. My father was averse to shooting out the window so he waited with his gun until the dog moved. The dog wisely stayed put. Its owner walked out onto the porch and told my father she had arranged for the dog to be relocated “way out in the country.” That settled the issue, and my father returned home.

There is a paucity of reliable data on American gun violence since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had research funding jerked in 1996. Influenced by the National Rifle Association, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment that year stating that no CDC funds could be used to advocate or promote gun control. Congress then chillingly defunded the CDC by $2.6 million which just happened to be the amount designated for the study of gun violence. Scientific investigators quickly got the message, and research on gun violence tanked.

Data from Medical Journals

Here is reliable information published this past year in three major medical journals – JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine: 1) gun violence takes 93 lives daily in America – many of them children; 2) most mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Las Vegas were done with semi-automatic weapons with large magazines; there has been a three-fold increase in the number of people killed in mass shootings following the lifting of the federal ban on assault-type weapons in 2004; 3) research funding and scientific publications about gun violence are miniscule (1.6% and 4.5% respectively) compared to other causes of death such as motor vehicle accidents which take a similar number of lives; 4) gun deaths are due to suicide in 61% of cases; 5) banning of semi-automatic weapons in the mid-1990s in Australia eliminated mass shootings in that country; and 6) gun violence in PG-13 movies has more than doubled since 1985.

Christianity and Violence

Can Christianity inform our opinions about the use of guns, weapons that did not exist for well over a millennium after the Bible was written? For the first three hundred years of Christianity, pacifism was the predominant interpretation of Christ’s teachings. The blood and gore of the early Old Testament.

were replaced by the Christian doctrines of peacemaking (beatitudes), non-violence (Christ’s admonition to Peter to put up his sword), and possibly frank pacifism (turning the other cheek). The Romans were reluctant to draft Christians into their armed forces for fear Christians would refuse to fight. As Christianity became the dominant religious faith, the “just war” tenets of Augustine and Aquinas replaced the pacifism of early Christianity. There are still Christian sects today who practice pacifism – Mennonites, Amish, and Seventh Day Adventists. Jesus consistently supported peacemaking and non-violence. Both Gandhi and King drew upon Christ’s example and organized their successful social justice movements around non-violence.

Public Policy and Gun Violence

Healthcare advocates for reduction in gun violence are realistic in confronting America’s proclivity toward violence. The following reasonable recommendations come from an acknowledgement of America’s individualism and the pro-gun interpretation of the second amendment: 1) support laws prohibiting the sale of semi-automatic weapons with large-capacity magazines; 2) require universal background checks for all gun sales; 3) prohibit gun ownership for people convicted of domestic violence; and 4) require insurance companies to offer mental health and drug abuse services comparable to other health services. With the exception of the semi-automatic weapons ban, the above proposals from a 2013 national survey were actually supported by a majority of gun owners. Finally research on violence prevention needs to be supported financially. There is no need to fear objective, scientific inquiry into a problem that gives us much to fear.