Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, April 15, 2023 - Throwing Love at Guns

After yet another mass shooting, I continue to wonder about the solution. I believe there must be one. Some societal equation we have yet to decipher. Some question we’ve forgotten to ask.

It is my spirituality toward which I turn when asking such vastly existential questions as this. That’s why it’s so often the advice to throw love at a situation we don’t understand or haven’t yet solved in order to decide how to best handle it. This means the spiritual answer to the gun problem must be love.

But guns are such a loaded topic, so full of grief and misery and loss. Politically volatile, goading us towards combustion, it’s hard to even have a reasonable conversation about it, much less throw love at it.

Yet, as far as the application of spiritual principles go, we must remember that guns are no different than any enemy. They are something that must be loved in order to be transformed. How does one love a gun when they are perceived to be the enemy? Psychologically, forgiveness of the gun itself is the first step. The second is forgiveness of those who use them for harm.

We’ve all heard the rhetoric that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ It’s used by Second Amendment advocates to sidestep the debate on gun control, but it inadvertently points us toward the real solution. 

People do kill people. A gun is an inanimate object. And as long as the argument is held over an inanimate object, the politicians get just what they really want: something over which they may permanently argue without ever having to resolve. Because there is no resolution. Guns will never be legislated out of improper use.

This means if we are to truly throw love toward the gun issue, we have to throw it much harder than we think. We have to throw hard enough that it perforates the obfuscating gun issue entirely so that it may fully strike the real causes miles behind it.

If we are to throw love in the direction of the solution, it is people which must be the recipients of that love. And if we therefore intend to throw love at people, we have to remember that more than anything, people need dignity, agency, and hope.

Throwing love at the gun issue means we need to throw love at human agency, meaning the right to determine one’s life, the ability to influence a beneficial outcome. This means it boils down even further to one vital thing which supports our best access to things like proper education, healthcare, and prosperity.

It is the universal right to vote. The epicenter of human agency in our society. Our voice. That is the target upon which our love must ultimately land if we wish to be of genuine service to those who have died or lost loved ones to gun violence.

Voting is our weak spot. It is the most vulnerable aspect of a self-governing people. Voting is so easily restrictable and corruptible by those who can operate behind closed doors. That impacts the system in a way that favors only the elite, who then utilize their power to further influence the rules on voting in their favor. That is the cycle to be broken.

As we steadily work toward improving our society in meaningful ways, the improper use of guns will slowly lose its allure. At present, the level of deep, existential frustration for those with inadequate access to education, healthcare, and prosperity makes guns a more than suitable provider of the dignity, agency, and hope they should be getting from society. Who can be surprised by what they’ve resorted to?

People are using guns to speak for themselves because they don’t have a voice. That is the illness we have been failing to treat, falsely believing the symptoms to be the virus. Improper gun use is a symptom, not an illness. Which means we’ve been going about it the wrong way.

The broader our voting access becomes, the more accurate and proper our representation will be toward legislation that actually empowers Americans; healthcare that actually works, education that actually teaches, and equal access to the American Dream. All the things without which violence becomes the only counterbalance.

You can’t control guns any more than you can control people. So we must love them right where they are. That is the only ecosystem in which a genuine solution will grow. 

In the meantime, while out there afflicting the comfortable, remember to comfort the afflicted. Our country is in a constant state of mourning. Pray for those affected, pray for us all, but also do something. Be with them. Hold them. Love them. Heal them.

And most of all, vote.