360 vs AR-15

I mentioned in my previous post that I went to seminary, got my MDiv, and that I am an ordained pastor serving in the Penn Central Conference of the United Church of Christ.  I didn't always live and serve in Pennsylvania, though.  My first two calls were to churches in the same Association of the Connecticut Conference as Newtown, Connecticut.

So please understand that what I am about to say isn't a knee-jerk reaction to yet another slanderous shot at one of my favorite pastimes.  Furthermore, please know that this isn't the first thing I thought about the whole tragic mess, let alone the last.

The truth is, the Bible flip-flops quite a bit on the subject of killing.  Especially in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The  Sixth Commandment seems pretty straightforward, "You shall not kill." (Exodus 20:13)  Then again, some translations say "You shall not murder."  So, there's that.  Then there's the whole debacle where Saul didn't kill enough people and livestock.  (I Samuel 15)  But then again, David is harshly punished for stealing his neighbor's wife and arranging to have him killed.  (2 Samuel 11-12:23)  And so on and so forth.  So what should I, as a good Christian, believe about killing?  Well, as far as the law goes, I use the interpretive lens that Jesus gave us:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’(Matthew 22:34-40)

In other words, all of what the law instructs us and everything the prophets told us can be summed up in those two laws.  Or, as I learned it at Silver Lake, if we just do three things—love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself—then you'll have a great week!  (or life, even!)  Saul failed to love God.  David failed to love his neighbor.  I'm still not sure what that means for people like Arnaud Amalric who clearly believed that God wanted him to kill the Cathars.  Except that I should note that he's most famous for allegedly saying, "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."  (Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His.)  Or as it is often misquoted, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out."

Personally, I believe that what violence accomplishes best is creating more violence and that the best way to break the cycle is to simply stop.  Just stop.  On the other hand, I can't in good conscience say that the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 were wrong to rush the cockpit.

Which finally brings me to the National Rifle Association and their reaction to the Newtown mass shooting.




I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the idea of protecting schools with armed guards.  I'm certainly more in favor of trained people (like the police, Secret Service, and other law enforcement personnel that Wayne Lapierre references in his address) than I am private armed citizens taking it upon themselves to protect our schools.  I'm certainly not at all sure that armed guards would actually do anything to dissuade the people that he's referring to when he says, "...our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters.  People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them."  And I'm quite sure that armed guards are not, if you'll excuse the phrase, a magic bullet.  Just ask Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy, Neil Gardner.  Just ask anyone stationed at Fort Hood on November 5th, 2009.

I believe that there is no magic bullet.  No one clear answer.  Maybe part of the answer is armed guards.  I don't know.  Maybe part of the answer is restricting access to guns that can fire 5 bullets a second.  And yes, I have read the Constitution.  So if you can prove that you're a member of a well regulated militia, we can talk more about your right to own an assault rifle.

So, I probably wouldn't even be writing this if it Lapierre hadn't gone off on video games—I won't even dignify the slam on popular music with a response, after all, that's so twenty years ago.  But blaming video games for violent behavior has become standard response, despite Lapierre's claim that the media is working to hide the idea.

I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe he really believes that video games are the root cause of human violence.  Unfortunately for him, the claim has no basis in fact.  According to the FBI's 2011 Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime has gone down over the past 10 years.  Video game use has gone up in the same amount of time.  If video games caused violent crime, wouldn't violent crime have gone up in that amount of time?

Ok, so, that's just the piddly research I could do over the course of an afternoon.  What does the Journal of Pediatrics say?  Oh.  It finds no support for a causal link between playing video games and violent behavior.  Well, what about Criminal Justice and Behavior?  Oh.  Playing violent video games isn't a significant risk for future violent criminal acts.  Well, what does the United States Supreme Court say?  Oh.   "Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively."

Please hear me.  This a more important issue than just irritating nearly every 35 year old in the country.  The fact that it is simply untrue that video games are the root problem here means that bringing it up is worse than dishonest.  It's unhelpful rhetoric serving no other purpose than to rile people up. It's a cheap pop and it has no place in the discussion of something as sad and holy and important as the memory of those who have died and the mourning of those that were left behind.

Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
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