Dear friends,

Two sets of pictures popped up in my Facebook memories feed today. The first was from three years ago today, when a group from St. Dunstan’s took to the streets of Atlanta, along with thousands of others, marching to demand sensible gun control laws in the wake of the high school massacre in Parkland, Florida.

The second photo was from another march six years ago, when I was part of a group that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the Selma Voting Rights March by making the five-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery.

Gun control and voting rights are still very much in the news today. We still don’t have sensible gun laws and voting rights are once again under attack.

We’ve had two mass murders, killing 18 people, in less than a week. The first one was close to home, happening just a few miles from the church. The other was in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. 

After the Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people in 2018, the Boulder city council passed a law banning the sale of assault weapons. On March 12 this year that ban was overturned by the courts. Four days later a young man in Boulder purchased an assault weapon. On the same day in Atlanta another young man made a similar purchase. He then took his shiny new gun out and started killing people — four at a massage parlor in Acworth, then four more at two massage parlors here on Piedmont Road. Six of eight of his victims were Asian women.

The Boulder shooter waited a few days before taking his new gun to the grocery store and randomly killing 10 people.

Since these shootings we’ve heard outrage from the people and the usual platitudes from craven lawmakers owned by the NRA. It is hard to imagine that anything will change, even with a President and a House that support gun control measures. 

Many of the lawmakers who want us all to have unfettered access to weapons are the same ones who want to limit access to the ballot box. Using the Big Lie of widespread voter fraud as an excuse, lawmakers in 43 states have introduced measures to make voting more difficult, particularly in primarily minority areas, where voting generally favors the Democrats. Voting rights activists call it “Jim Crow in a coat and tie.”

Both of these issues, gun control and voting rights, should be of concern to Christians. It’s not hard to imagine what Jesus would have to say about them. There is no Christian argument to make in favor of assault weapons. Nor is there one to make in favor of restricting voting rights. Respecting the dignity of every human being means giving them the right to go to the grocery store or to school or church or a concert without fear of being caught in a massacre. It also means having your voice count at the ballot box.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who participated in the original Selma march, said that marching for a cause was praying with your feet. Sensible gun laws and voting rights are both causes which set our feet to prayer. To quote the wonderful hymn “Lift Every Voice and SIng,” — Facing the rising sun of a new day begun, let us march on til victory is won.

29511486_10215312788469905_1307663575162548544_n.jpg
Part of the St. Dunstan’s contingent in the march for sensible gun laws.
164472036_10224898793993939_4522028779785091461_o.jpg
Day four of the Selma-Montgomery march in 2015.


For an historical view of the evolution of the NRA read this excellent piece by Heather Cox Richardson:

Heather Cox Richardson, Mar 24

Ten more people in Boulder, Colorado, died yesterday, shot by a man with a gun, just days after we lost 8 others in Atlanta, Georgia, shot by a man with a gun. 

In 2017, after the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas, political personality Bill O’Reilly said that such mass casualties were “the price of freedom.” 

But his is a very recent interpretation of guns and their meaning in America. 

The Second Amendment to the Constitution is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia. 

As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

The path to today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places. 

One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.

By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges and in local, state and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunitions and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.

NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns, but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons, prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children, to require all dealers to be licensed, and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War Two. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors. Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. 

In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan– for the first time. 

When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew. 

In 1981, a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.

After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Although until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun, in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

In 1991, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional. 

Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000, it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012, the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent more than $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members— recently supported background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it. 

Maybe this time things will be different. Today President Biden called for the Senate to pass measures already passed by House lawmakers for universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons.

More important, perhaps, is that new voices are making themselves heard on this issue. The political participation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) jumped by 91% in Georgia in 2020 and was key to electing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate. The Georgia murders, six of which took the lives of women of Asian descent, have inspired this community to demand policy changes that address hate crimes and violence. 

Judy Chu (D-CA), chair of the 21-person Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told Politico’s Maya King: “Certainly for AAPIs who may not have been involved before, this is a wake up call to say, ‘You need to be involved.’”

—-

 Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-mass-shootings-are-not-the-price-of-freedom/2017/10/05/d268dc8c-a928-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/03/chris-abele/do-90-americans-support-background-checks-all-gun-/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/guns-boulder-shooting-assault-weapons-ban/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/politics/biden-gun-control-colorado-atlanta/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/us/politics/senate-gun-control.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/23/georgia-asian-communities-political-outreach-477606

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/11/the-nra-placed-big-bets-on-the-2016-election-and-won-almost-all-of-them/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/the-nra-spent-dollar30-million-to-elect-trump-was-it-russian-money

Pin It on Pinterest