Today, I got into an altercation with the guy who killed the Sutherland Springs shooter.

Today, I got into an altercation with the guy who killed the Sutherland Springs shooter. Who was out there telling a crowd that God gave and blessed him with the second amendment. That God empowered him to go kill that man. I hate what this says about God. That God just let over two dozen of his followers perish in his house of worship so that this armed man could have a moment of glory. What does that say about God? Like think about the conflict of that?

The pride of it preaches a very peculiar and inconsistent image of God.

The Cross of Jesus is a statement against violence. Christ received the violence of the world into himself. If you believe in the resurrection, then you believe he defeated that violence with life. The way of Christ is of creation and life, aligning with security in tools of destruction and death is not the gospel.

He said his friends said if he had just arrived 15 seconds earlier he could have saved more lives.

I see such problem in that. That we have and uphold tools capable of that magnitude in 15 seconds or less and that we block any effort to make them harder to acquire. That we believe the common person should easily be able to attain that power.

A lady pulled me aside writhing in the face demanding that I answer her question of whether or not I thought someone would drive up and shoot the armed people in their protest.

I told her I have no reason to believe that’s not possible. She then shouted “Well, what do you think we’d do to that person???”

I said I bet you’d kill him.  But how many of you could he kill first. Ma’am, that’s my issue. What you’re advocating just means we’ll have dead bodies no matter what. Everything you desire is reactionary and headline after headline and especially this man you’re all standing behind prove that this isn’t enough. Dozens are still killed in an instant and I want that to change. It is insane to me that you have bowed down to this and that you are promoting a world where our only logical method of safety is to take up arms to go to Walmart, to the movie theater, to our holy places. To our ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. Just so we hopefully can be the good guy with a gun that kills or stops the bad guy with a gun. Dayton, Ohio and Parkland should show the fault of such myths. And yet you keep insisting this is the way throwing even more weapons out into the world. I refuse that world. I rebuke that lie. You hope so desperately to be the person that stops a shooter that you walk around with a giant rifle on your shoulder making everyone else even more uncomfortable and afraid.

It is not of God.

All these uncompromising gun rights advocates do is get in the way and hide behind the ideology that criminals will break the laws anyway.

Except these instances are not entirely reflective of that. Guns are regularly purchased legally. Shannon Watts put it perfectly the other day: There are 400 million guns in the hands of civilians in America. If more guns and fewer gun laws made us safer, we would be the safest country in the world. In fact, we have the highest rate of gun violence of any developed nation.

Can we totally eradicate violence and gun violence by adding regulations? I sincerely doubt it. But can we make progress towards such an end? Can we prevent more of them? I believe that entirely. Make it harder to acquire these weapons and then crack down on those abuses of the law. Make it harder for criminals and those who would sell to criminals to get those weapons. Make it harder for a child to take a weapon from their  parents gun closet. Catch those red flags and put a temporary hold on flagged purchases.
Try literally anything.

The fact that criminals break laws is not an excuse to allow this madness to simply go on because there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

I told them yes, we have a heart problem. Yes, we have broken people and families in need of healing. Yes, it needs to be dealt with and love needs to be brought in more than we might believe capable. But our nation’s arsenal, our obsession with guns is a part of that heart problem. That we allow such brokenness to so easily arm itself is a part of that heart problem. That is wickedness and it is getting in the way of freedom and life. And I will not stand for it.

We don’t have to live like this.
We don’t have to live like this.

We don’t have to live like this.