A recent full-page ad in the Christian Science Monitor put out by a group called Handgun Control, Inc. featured a pistol with stars painted on its handle and stripes across the chamber and barrel; above the gun was a list of statistics: "In 1985, handguns killed 46 people in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 31 in Switzerland, 5 in Canada, 18 in Israel, 5 in Australia and 8,092 in the United States. God Bless America." In the same issue, on page 7, the Monitor reported a move by California to ban military assault weapons like the AK-47 used by a drifter to gun down schoolchildren in Stockton, California. The writer says that more than 30 million semi-automatic weapons are estimated to exist in the U.S., a growing portion of which are such weapons as the Uzi, MAC-10, and AR-15 (a version of the M-16).
The Second Amendment reads, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." But people hoarding millions of semi-automatic rifles and thousands of handguns do not constitute a "well-regulated militia," and their "right to bear arms" needs to be infringed. We need to regulate heavily, if not ban outright, certain weapons whose only purpose is to kill people.
But the real point of this commentary is not an argument for gun control but a more severe question: What do so many guns tell us about the people who have them? The answer is brutally clear: the guns signal that people in a land overflowing with wealth are feeling scared, distrustful, powerless, and vindictive. Why are they feeling this way? What went wrong?
The short-term, corporate, capitalist mentality that so brilliantly lit up the world at the end of the 19th-century can no longer provide answers because it is at the root of the problem. We need a new ethic of what it means to be successful, an ethic that integrates rather than disintegrates, that defines profit in terms other than money. To oversimplify, it means holding a spiritual appreciation for the oneness of life on earth coupled with a weekly effort to separate the glass from the paper for the recycling center and grassroots political organizing for social justice. The Green party in West Germany is a political example of such an ethic; a new book edited by David Griffin called Spirituality and Society offers a pungent array of views about how to "unnarrow" our minds. Good suggestions are out there about how to unite the separated parts of ourselves so that we aren't so frightened by the modern society we have wrought. If we give flesh to these ideas and make ourselves less frightening to one another, we won't need guns; we will simply need each other.
Thanksgiving
Feburary