“This isn’t about guns at all. People who want to be violent will always be violent. This isn’t a gun problem, it’s a heart problem.”
Stop.
You and I both know that’s a lie.
We both know you’re not being completely honest here.
People with heart problems don’t mow down dozens of soft-faced first graders with a handful of rocks.
People with heart problems don’t often ravage movie theater goers with a bag of bricks.
People with heart problems aren’t purposefully murdering scores of strangers and co-workers and ex-lovers every single day with sticks and shards of glass.
People with heart problems aren’t ripping holes through other’s bodies on live TV with baseball bats they bought from Wal-Mart.
When people’s heart problems cause them to snap and to do the unthinkable in a moment of grief or rage or paranoia, they don’t usually reach for a broken bottle or a hammer or even a car.
That’s because bullets and assault weapons are a far more accessible and successful method of brutality—and people with heart problems know it.
You know it. I know it. So let’s stop kidding ourselves and let’s be honest and deal with this.
As a pastor, I live every day in close proximity to the human heart.
I make it my life’s work to set up residence there and to try and bring healing and restoration.
I know the kind of hatred we all can cultivate.
I understand the vile darkness we all nurture.
I get that all people are equally capable of really terrible things.
But when people want to do terrible things, guns make it almost effortless to do those terrible things and to do them more quickly, violently, irrevocably, and to many more people than they otherwise could—and that’s a problem.
Guns magnify the horror of the human heart. They explode the evil we harbor there. They conveniently multiply the carnage without much effort.
So no, this is not a heart problem. It’s a gun problem.
Because if as you say it’s all about the heart, then let’s not screen people getting on planes anymore. Let’s let everyone carry anything they’d like onboard, because terrorists just have heart problems and they’ll always find a way to bring aircraft down.
Let’s allow our teenagers to go to school with any kinds of weapons and drugs and pornography, because the destructive stuff they do to themselves and others is really all about heart problems, and they’ll find a way to engage in all that stuff even if we ban it.
That’s not how life works. It’s not how we function as a civilized society. That’s not how we protect ourselves from damage, or others from themselves, or the vulnerable from the violent, or anyone from anything we see as a threat to the population.
Regardless of the dangers in the world, we never attempt to legislate the human heart but we do legislate to protect others from when those hearts fail and become toxic.
You know, the more I think about it; the fact that you choose to say over and over again that we don’t have a gun problem—that’s the bigger heart problem here.
To witness the daily, bloody, deadly atrocities our nation is enduring and to willfully ignore the very instrument of all of it, shows a coldness and lack of compassion that simply staggers and frightens me.
Unless you’re willing to offer a foolproof, immediate, measurable, sustainable plan for fully fixing all of our heart problems and you’re ready to start implementing it today, I’m going to have to assume that you simply value guns more than you value the dozens of lives they take every single day, and will take on this one.
If you’ll fight more passionately for your own right to protect yourself from an imagined Bogeyman you’ll very likely never face, than for those innocent souls who will most surely die if we don’t change our national response to gun violence, then I’m gravely concerned for your heart too.
I’m worried about the collective heart of America.
As for my heart, it is breaking again.
