Category: Guns/NRA

A Proposed 28th Amendment for Gun Control. I’d Vote For It

The film maker and famed political commentator, Michael Moore, has composed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution. He presented the Amendment to Congress on July 11, 2022.

The 28th Amendment would repeal and replace the 2nd Amendment.

As lifelong hunter and gun owner, I would vote YES.

You can check it out here at Moore’s blog. I have also reproduced the entire Amendment below:

XXVIII AMENDMENT

SECTION 1.
The inalienable right of a free people to be kept safe from gun violence and the fear thereof must not be infringed and shall be protected by the Congress and the States. This Amendment thus repeals and replaces the Second Amendment.

SECTION 2.
Congress shall create a mandatory system of firearm registration and licensing for the following limited purposes: (a) licensed hunters of game; (b) licensed ranges for the sport of target shooting; and (c) for the few who can demonstrate a special need for personal protection. 

All who seek a firearm will undergo a strict vetting process with a thorough background check, including the written and confidential approval of family members, spouses and ex-spouses and/or partners and ex-partners, co-workers and neighbors. A mental health check will also be required. There will be a waiting period of one month to complete the full background check. 

SECTION 3.
Those who meet all the requirements for the restricted gun owners groups and successfully pass the background check must take a firearms safety class and pass a written test on an annual basis. 

SECTION 4.
The minimum age for the restricted groups who can own a firearm is 25 years old. Renewal and review of the firearms license will occur on an annual basis. 


SECTION 5.
Congress will stipulate and continually update the limited list of approved firearms for civilian use, including weapons in the future that are not yet invented. The following firearms are heretofore banned:

  • All automatic and semi-automatic weapons and all devices which can enable a single-shot gun to fire automatically or semi-automatically;

   • Any weapon that can hold more than six bullets or rounds at a time or any magazine that holds more than six bullets;

   • All guns made of plastic or any homemade equipment and machinery or a 3D printer that can make a gun or weapon that can take a human life.

SECTION 6.
Congress shall regulate all ammunition, capacity of ammunition, the storage of guns, gun locks, gun sights, body armor and the sale and distribution of such items. No weapons of any kind whose sole intention is the premeditated elimination of human life are considered legal. Congress may create future restrictions as this amendment specifically does not grant any American the “right” to own any weapon.  

SECTION 7.
Police who are trained and vetted to use firearms shall be subject to comprehensive and continuous monitoring and shall be dismissed if found to exhibit any racist or violent behavior. 

SECTION 8.
Persons already owning any of the above banned firearms, and who do not fall into the legal groups of restricted firearms owners, will have one month from the ratification of this Amendment to turn in their firearms for destruction by local law enforcement. These local authorities may organize a gun buy-back program to assist in this effort.

What Does It Mean to Say, We Can’t Govern Our Way Out of Chaos?

I’ve got another comparison of two video clips for you today. Except, this time I will allow you to make your own analysis without my input.

The first clip is of a dude on the Christian Broadcasting Network speaking about the recent mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

His verdict on the renewed debate over gun control? “We can govern our way out of chaos.” Tell me what’s wrong with his thinking.

The second clip is again from an interview on Democracy Now.

Amy Goodman discusses the actions taken in Australia after a mass shooting shocked the nation in 1996. No, Australia was not transformed by a religious revival. It was transformed by legislation.

Yep, governing can make a difference, dude.

Here is the first video clip:

Below is the Democracy Now interview:

 

 

Police Loitered Outside of Uvalde School While Shooter Massacred Children

As more details about the recent Texas school massacre are released, the picture becomes increasingly disturbing.

Eye-witnesses are now explaining that local police stood outside the school, leaving the killer inside the building for nearly an hour. They made no attempt to enter the school or to stop the shooter during this time.

In fact, the police prohibited locals gathered outside the school from launching an assault of their own when the police refused to intervene and stop the killing.

Police actually tasered one man who tried to enter the school on his own. Meanwhile, local police entered through the back door to remove their own children from the school while listening to the murderous gunfire killing 19 children and two teachers.

As it becomes increasingly clear that that US police are being trained to place their own safety above public safety, it is long past time to ask questions.

When and where was this decision made? Where are the training materials being produced? Why does anyone enlist for a potentially dangerous job if they are not willing to take risks?

Our risk-averse police force is literally killing people.

The police shoot unarmed black people regularly. Now they have the blood of another 21 people on their hands because they cared more about their own safety than they did about the little children they had sworn to serve.

The traditional law-enforcement motto, to protect and serve, seems now only to apply to themselves.

Below is an excerpt from an article on the Associated Press News site. It’s titled “Onlookers Urged Police to Charge into Texas School.”

Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.

Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

“They were unprepared,” he added.

Read the entire article here.

Below is a clip from Breaking Points News which discusses this new dimension of the Texas shooting story. They include video of the parents standing outside the school shouting at police to enter and subdue the shooter:

Two Different Perspectives on the Buffalo Shootings. Which Makes More Sense?

(The photos throughout this post display only some of the victims of the mass shooting in Buffalo.)

Below I have posted two very different analyses of the recent mass shooting committed by a young white supremacist in Buffalo, NY.

They are both fairly brief. So, watch both and then rejoin me at the bottom to read my own thoughts about each perspective. I will try to keep my comments as short as possible.

If you want to explore this issue further with me, just make a comment on the blog page. I always respond as quickly as possible.

The first is an editorial from the Christian Broadcasting Network titled “How Americans Can Prevent More Mass Shootings.” The second is an interview from the alternative news program Democracy Now titled “Lessons for Buffalo? Meet the Activist Who Sued the White Supremacists Behind Charlottesville & Won.”

My response. (I’ll give you a heads up — I disagree with everything in the CBN editorial. The Jewish granddaughter of Holocaust survivors makes much more sense and offers far better suggestions for change):

Celestine Chaney

We must begin by noting CBN’s utter neglect of the white supremacist ideology that motivated the Buffalo murders. It only mentions that he had “come under the spell of others” briefly as if he were unwittingly seduced my mysterious, dark forces.

The fact that the shooter wrote a very lengthy online manifesto declaring both his hatred of African-Americans and brown-skinned immigrants as well as his plans to commit a mass shooting are conveniently ignored.

Consequently, the obvious questions for local law enforcement as to how in

Ruth Whitfield

the world a young white supremacist, spewing vitriol, who had previously been brought in for questioning after threatening to commit a local school shooting, are nowhere within earshot.

The idea that his young man had personal agency and willingly embraced his racist ideology is also buried very deeply. My suspicion is that CBN’s right-wing Republican political stance is on full display in this editorial decision.

Roberta Drury

More than that, I suspect that CBN producers regularly consult with Republican party leaders to gather the newest party “talking points.” The Republicans are very busy working to separate their public image from violent racism at the moment — while continuing openly to embrace this evil on the campaign trail, especially when visiting Mara Lago to kiss Trump’s ring — so CBN was almost certainly told to keep

Heyward Patterson

this issue hidden beneath their tight fitting neocon helmet.

Unsurprisingly, the idea of tougher gun laws is put to bed immediately. The implication is crystal clear: restrictive gun laws do not work in limiting gun violence. The spokesman rightly points out that NY state already has very restrictive gun laws, but those laws did not prevent this shooting.

Aaron Salter

At this point, CBN demonstrates the complete absence of “fact-checkers” in the news room. It’s been widely reported that the NY shooter crossed the state line and purchased the guns and ammunition used in the shooting from a Massachusetts gun shop.

The obvious implication — at least, it appears obvious to my feeble mind — is the need for greater uniformity in US gun laws beginning with a nation-wide, federal ban on all semi-automatic rifles. The shooter ought not have been able to purchase his murderous implements anywhere in the country.

But then, on second thought, perhaps there are fact-checkers at CBN, but the powers-that-be decided to manipulate their conservative, anti-gun law viewers with gross misinformation, which are in fact, outright lies.

If this is the case, then so much for the Christian morality and integrity that the editorialist beats the drum about towards the editorial’s conclusion.

The heart of the problem, according to CBN, is American immorality, most profoundly displayed in the absence of any generally maintained “Christian world-view” among American church-goers.

I have an earlier post criticizing this particular red herring, so I won’t repeat myself here. You can read the previous post if interested.

Geraldine Talley

This supposed lack of a robust Christian world-view among American Christians then becomes a launching pad for the standard, conservative lament about the egregious moral decline of our society, as if we all now inhabit the historic, indecent nadir of US moral degeneracy.

Here it becomes obvious that along with the absent fact-checkers, neither are there any American historians in the CBN editorial room.

But the standard tropes are trotted out once again. The two successive turning points for America’s irreligious degradation are the well-known bobbsy twins of US degeneracy: the outlawing of prayer in our public schools (a ruling that strangely never affected me during my public school career, since I prayed regularly in school without difficulty or interruption), and the Supreme Court ruling of Roe vs. Wade.

As a direct result of these two legal decisions, the United States began a

Pearl Young

rapid descent into indecency and flagrant wickedness that has swept the nation and now instigates young, white men like the Buffalo shooter to “randomly” mow down black Americans with a semi-automatic rifle in the local grocery’s produce aisle.

Does that make sense to you? I must confess that it totally baffles me.

Naturally, by the end of CBN’s ahistorical and irrational monologue it all comes down to the failure of parents, meaning that the obvious solution is to, once again, “focus on the family.”

Cultivating stronger, more godly families is, as always, the social, cultural, political, religious panacea needed to solve the problems of white supremacy and gun violence in this country of ours.

More Christian parents, promoting the properly Biblical world-view, taking greater responsibility for the spiritual nurture of their children becomes the one-size-fits-all remedy for everything that ails America.

It’s just that simple.

Or is it? Come back tomorrow for part two of my response to these two videos. I’ve got a lot more to say…unsurprisingly. But I think that this post is already long enough.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The Rittenhouse Trial Has Nothing to Do with Race, But Everything to Do with Guns and Media Distractions

Watching segments of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is like stepping into a

Kyle Rittenhouse

circus fun-house. It is disorienting for me because no one bothers to point out the obvious elephant in the room.

No, it’s not a matter of race. All of Rittenhouse’s victims (the word outlawed from the courtroom by the judge) were white.

It’s not about Jacob Blake, the black man shot seven times in the back by police at close range, whose shooting sparked the Black Lives Matter marches in Kenosha, WI were the shooting occurred.

The disorienting factor to me is the fact that a 17 year old kid crossed state lines (with his mother), purchased a semi-automatic rifle he could not legally own, and then casually walked the streets, parading himself before city police doing fist bumps with relaxing officers, and nobody stopped him.

Then after he murders a man, numerous onlookers try to disarm him (however ineffectual their attempts) as he casually walks away from his first victim (yep, there’s that word again). At that point the “active shooter”, aka Rittenhouse, believes he has the right to shoot more people “in self defense.”

I’m sorry but America has gone crazy.

The undeniable evidence of America’s insanity is not Black Lives Matter protests, or antifa agitators, but gun advocates’ and the Right-Wing’s unwillingness to acknowledge heavily armed, juvenile reckless endangerment as it parades through our streets after dark.

Nowadays such blatantly antisocial, dangerous, frightening, and ultimately deadly, behavior is perfectly acceptable. No one bats an eye (provided the shooter is a white male. So maybe there is a racial tint here, after all.)

And Rittenhouse will almost certainly be set free.

On an even more depressing related note, Matt Taibbi (one of my favorite journalists) points out the truly monumental economic story that is being ignored as the media keeps its cameras fixated on Rittenhouse.

“As America Falls Apart, Profits Soar” is the title of Taibbi’s  article. You can find it at his substack site.

It’s a common yet commonly ignored story.  The rich get richer while the rest of us become poorer. And nobody acts to stop the huge economic disparities that are becoming worse and worse.

Our growing wealth gap and class divisions are a much bigger pink elephant in America’s living room. A dangerous problem that billionaires and CEOs  prefer to ignore…at their own peril.

Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article (all emphases are mine):

As the country again prepares to go to war with itself, this time over a high-

Journalist Matt Taibbi

profile trial, a bigger story goes unnoticed.

. . . On the day the Rittenhouse trial began, the financial data firm FactSet released an eyebrow-raising report about the Covid-19 economy.

The firm noted that companies in the S&P 500 were set to post a net 12.9% profit in the third quarter of 2021. They pointed out this was the second-highest result since the firm began tracking the number in 2008. . . 

. . . Remember last year’s long summer of riots, that period that saw the whole world arguing over the definition of “mostly peaceful,” and saw Rittenhouse go charging into the streets of Kenosha? During that long stretch of unrest, corporate America, which had been headed for a depression in March of 2020, was soaring above the fray on an apparently endless, and endlessly escalating, ride to record profits. Take a look at this graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and focus on the Jeff-Bezos-rocket-like ascent beginning in the second quarter of 2020:

Corporate profits in the second quarter of 2020 sat at $1.58 trillion. One year later, that number was $2.69 trillion, a roughly 71% increase. How many stories have you read in the last year telling you about how well the top end of the income distribution has been doing, while the rest of the country seemed to be falling apart?

Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis.

Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers.

In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live in America at all).

All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out.

It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of efficiency. Keeping the volk at each other’s throats instead of pitchforking the aristocrats is an old game, one that’s now gone digital and works better than ever. That might be worth remembering after the coming verdict, and ahead of whatever other hyper-publicized panic comes down the pipeline next.

You can read the entire article here.

Today Is Always a Good Day to Stand Up for God’s Kingdom

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio happened within 13 hours of each other.  Together they leave 29 people dead and between 50 to 60 people wounded.

Police on the scene in El Paso

The El Paso gunman left behind a manifesto proclaiming his allegiance to white supremacy, decrying the dangerous hordes of brown immigrants “flooding” across our southern border.  I haven’t heard any details yet about the shooter in Ohio, his motives or political ideology.

At least, law enforcement has begun to describe these horrific incidents for what they are:  domestic terrorism.

The FBI continues to warn that the vast majority of these incidents are committed by right-wing political extremists who are, without exception, white men.  In most cases, their targets are people of color.  Nowadays, anyone who looks like they might be Hispanic or Muslim is scrutinized without mercy.

Look at YouTube to watch the many videos posted there showing the white vigilantes who have deputized themselves to harass people of color.  They call the police because they overheard someone speaking a different language, or saw a black person walking through the neighborhood and “looking suspicious while being black.”

No informed citizen with an ounce of common sense can deny the overt,

Survivors of the El Paso shootings

blatant, explicit encouragement that such anti-immigrant, white, racist extremism is receiving from the White House.

If you don’t understand or believe that previous sentence then, I am sorry, but you are lost.

You need to be converted.

Your conscience has been swallowed up by the swamp of moral relativism and outright evil that has taken hold of this country’s public life, especially within the comfortable parlors of political conservatism, Republicanism and establishment D.C. power brokers.

And, yes, that moral degeneration includes the Democrats as well as anyone else who remains silent while the newest wave of neo-Nazis, skin-heads, neo-fascists and every other stripe of authoritarian race-baiter feels that this moment in our nation’s history is their opportunity to resurrect the Confederate flag and wave a banner of white, racial superiority over the graves of innocent men, women and children whose skin-tone carries too much melanin.

But I reserve my strongest condemnation for conservative evangelicals who continue to endorse this president’s policies and turn a blind eye to the daily dose of hatred spewing forth from his puerile and filthy mouth.

He is the latest anti-Christ who has risen up to deceive the church; like a  false prophet crying, “Peace, peace!” while he sows seeds of hatred, lies and racial division.

Everyone likes to imagine they would have been a hero in Hitler’s Germany.  We all tell ourselves, “I would have resisted.  I would have hidden Jews in MY attic.  I would never have allowed the Nazi flag in MY church.  The Fuehrer’s censors would have never have been allowed to edit MY sermons.”

We swear that we would have been a faithful Israelite, never to be counted among the idolaters that sent the nation into exile.

We would have been faithful disciples. Unlike Simon Peter, we would have spoken up in Jesus’ defense when the time came.

Well, folks now is the moment, another moment of truth.

Another opportunity for faithfulness to Christ is staring us in the face.  The question is – what will we, what can we, do?

I have a few suggestions:

  1. Every church, and every member of every church, located in a town, village, city or unincorporated township with a population of dark-skinned immigrants needs to walk door-to-door through those neighborhoods, shaking hands and offering hugs, help and resources while welcoming those people of color into your community. Listen to their stories. Ask if there is anything you and/or your church community can do to help meet their needs.  Then follow through, and do it. Make new friends. Have them over to your home; eat together and publicly testify to their humanity at every opportunity. Push for your church to become a more inter-racial community, if it isn’t already.
  2. Challenge all racist, white-nationalist types of conversation whenever, wherever you hear it – especially among Christians. Remind people that Jesus of Nazareth was a very brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew who had once been an immigrant himself seeking safety in a foreign land (Egypt). We worship a dark-skinned Savior.  Avoid fights, but faithfully and boldly represent the universal love of God for all people everywhere.
  3. Remind people that there is a difference between illegal immigration and seeking asylum. Asylum-seeking is perfectly legal. In fact, I believe that America owes automatic asylum – even citizenship – to anyone fleeing a dangerous situation in a country that has been destabilized by U.S. intervention, whether military, political or economic. THAT, my friends, includes the whole of Central and South America.  When the United States helps to destroy the social fabric of a nation by forcing it to adopt policies that serve American interests first, then we must take responsibility for the human fall-out. (Personally, I also believe that illegal immigration ought to be decriminalized.  We would still have border guards patrolling the southern border humanely, seeking to care for the people they detain and send back, but what is the point of jailing these people as felons after their second capture?  It serves no purpose but to enrich those who own America’s private, for-profit prison/detention system.)
  4. I haven’t touched on the many related issues such as the American gun lobby, gun ownership, etc. because I don’t want this post to become a book. We could also talk about the policy of separating children from their parents when detained at the border, and the fact that our government admits to having “lost track” of nearly 1,500 of these children.  Imagine if they were your children…
  5. Urge your pastor to talk about these issues in the context of obedient Christian discipleship. It is obvious and easy to “pray for the victims” of a mass shooting. Perhaps, it is the pastoral thing to do. But think about it: what good did it do for patriotic, German pastors to offer nice pastoral prayers for those who were being arrested and tortured by Hitler’s SS guards, while remaining silent about the immoral policies being implemented by those unjust arrests?  The church needs more than safe, pastoral prayers for victims. We need strong leadership and pointed Biblical teaching that identifies immorality and injustice in the public square; that gives direction to God’s counter-cultural ways of kingdom living in a nation wrestling with its own racist demons.

How Can Anyone Claim to Believe in Jesus When They Don’t Understand The First Thing About Him?

A newly discovered 4th century papyrus contains a number of Gospel sayings (e.g. pericopes) that present a shockingly different portrait of Jesus.

Scholars are uniformly surprised that such widely divergent alternatives could possibly exist.  For example:

Blessed are those who resort to violence to defend themselves, for they will control the earth.

Blessed are those who carry a loaded Colt .45 Peacemaker, for they will be called Sons of the God of War.

When someone hits you on the right cheek, turn your snub-nose .38 upon  them and shoot with accuracy.

Do not resist the urge to overpower an evil person, with deadly force if required.  Use all means necessary to ensure that you and your lovely ones never feel threatened in any way.  For your life is more valuable than anyone else’s.

It should be obvious that no such papyri exists.  Just to be crystal clear, this is a spoof.

Sadly, in this age of infantile evangelicalism, we can no longer take it for granted that the average church-goer understands either New Testament teaching or the gospel portrait of Jesus.

Another perfect example of the dire, debilitating condition of conservative Christianity in this country appears in the NBC news story below.  It’s called “Armed Volunteers Train in Hopes of Protecting Parishioners Against Potential Attacks.”  Take a look:

The interviews speak for themselves.  It’s all oh-so American.  It’s also as contrary to Jesus’ model, his ethics and the Kingdom of God as one could possibly imagine.

If Your Pastor is Packing Heat, You Need to Stop Listening to Him

Recently a good friend sent me a selection of articles from past issues of the Christian Century.   They all deal with Christianity and gun control.  More specifically, they contain stories about the ways various churches are dealing with concealed carry laws in their states and whether they allow guns in church. (You can read my previous posts about gun control and guns in church here, and here.)

I may revisit other articles in the future, but for now, I was especially struck by an article from pastor Kyle Childress entitled, “In Texas, Even the Pastors are Carrying Guns in the Pulpit” (3/7/16 in print, 3/16/16 online).

Several years ago I attended a public meeting sponsored by a cadre of local churches.  Several hundred people showed up at the local Hilton Hotel conference room.  At the end of his anti-Muslim rant, the visiting pastor/speaker boasted about the fact that he and all  his church elders carried their guns to every church activity, both inside and out of the church building, in order “to protect their flock.”

Contrast that man’s view of Christian faith with the following story excerpted from pastor Childress’s article:

“The rationale of gun-carrying church members is that they want to be ready to protect themselves and their families if an armed intruder enters the church.  But with the new [concealed carry] law in place, who will know if the person is an armed intruder or an armed visitor?…All visitors are now scrutinized, with every visitor being a potential threat.  At the same time, to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the new law, some churches are posting signs that say — as an act of outreach — ‘Guns Welcome Here.’

“I’ve been astonished at the level of fear associated with perceived threats that are just outside our doors ready to get us…I keep asking myself where the witness of Christ is in all of this. Many of the pastors who are carrying guns teach and preach a version of the gospel that’s different from what I know.  It is a gospel of everyone looking out for himself or herself, a gospel that says, ‘It’s a dangerous world, so get them before they get you…’

“One of my deacons, the dean of a nearby college, was in a faculty meeting listening to faculty members discuss how they were all getting guns.  The dean said she refused to carry a gun.  It got quiet in the room, then someone asked why.  She said she was not prepared to shoot and perhaps kill someone.  There

Jesus arrested on trumped up charges. Maybe if he had carried a gun…?

was a long pause and then ‘What would you do if someone threatening came into the classroom?’  The dean said, ‘I’d tell them about Jesus and try to show them the love of Jesus.’

“‘You could hear a pin drop,’ she told me later. ‘Everyone looked at the floor, and someone changed the subject.’

“During a sermon on baptism a few weeks ago, I explained why I would not be carrying a gun in the pulpit or anywhere else. ‘It has to do with baptism,’ I said.  ‘When I went down into the waters of baptism, I did not come out to strap on a gun.  I came out entering into the life of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.’  I went on, ‘In baptism our lives are no longer our own.  We belong to Christ.’  I could see and hear some crying in the congregation…”

Our lives are no longer our own.

We belong wholly and completely belong to Jesus Christ to do with as He pleases.

If your pastor is packing heat, I am afraid that he doesn’t have wisdom enough to lead a conga line, much less the people of God.