No, our problem with gun violence isn’t a ‘sin problem’ | Opinion
America doesn’t have a gun violence problem - despite our country experiencing a level of gun violence not seen anywhere else in the industrialized world. We have a sin problem. That’s what I’ve been repeatedly told, most often by self-professed Christians, the majority of whom happen to be white.
“Send me a picture of the make/model that is self-loading, self-aiming, locates [its] own targets/victims and fires on its own,” I hear. “The gun is just a means to an end like a knife or any other weapon. You know the human heart is desperately wicked; who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)”
Before I get back to that, I want to tell you about a man whose name you likely don’t know if you don’t live in Myrtle Beach, S.C., or maybe even if you do. His name is William Art Gause. Truth be told, I have always had trouble remembering his first name. In my many discussions with him, I only and always called him Rev. Gause. He was focused on God’s work, the kind Jesus admonished each of his followers to commit to doing. We are supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, not just preach his word but act upon it.
That means going into the toughest places and deal with the toughest problems and love on people you don’t really want to while protecting the vulnerable and innocent and refusing to be silent in the face of evil. That’s Rev. Gause. He was buried on Thursday after dying last week. I say that’s who he is rather than was because those types of spirits never leave us.
Gause spent decades in one of the most economically-depressed areas of Horry County, a predominantly-black area whose median income is a fraction of the surrounding areas. He was a member of The Greater True Light Ministries of Myrtle Beach but best known for his work outside of the church. He was such a thorn in the side of drug dealers they firebombed his house. And he still didn’t leave. He kept building coalitions – interracial, private and public – to provide a place for God knows how many kids over several decades, kids who otherwise would have been left to their own devices after school given that their parents often had to work extremely long hours at low-wage paying jobs to (barely) make ends meet.
He worked with police officers and code enforcement officials and city and council members and other activists and anyone willing to stand in the breach with him. He wasn’t perfect. He could at times be prickly, and later in life stubborn to the point of annoying even those trying to help him help others.
There were others like him, too. They are the people who often get ignored by those advocating a cartoonish interpretation of the Second Amendment or when activists speak out against police brutality. They’d rather pretend people like Gause and so many others who are exhaustively taking the steps so many have so often claimed black people aren’t taking don’t exist. That makes it easier for them to deflect from the root causes of our sick gun culture.
Fortunately, activists like Gause see this fight as a calling from God, which brings me back to that reader’s email. Gun violence isn’t just a sin problem. It’s a gun problem. I’ve attended enough candlelight vigils, participated in enough anti-violence marches, programs and initiatives – know too many people taken from this world far too soon – to know the work of men like Gause is exponentially harder because there are so many guns on our streets.
Without guns there would still be poverty, still be mental illness, still be bad actors. There would still be sin. It’s just that guns have made the consequences of all such things worse, the carnage more devastating. That’s true even of suicide. If a person can survive a suicide attempt, research tells us they have a solid chance of living a happy-fulfilled life afterwards. When they attempt suicide with a gun, their odds of surviving the attempt plummet.
This isn’t a call for mass gun confiscation. This is a call for those among us who claim to want to live in a better world, one in which we don’t so easily and breezily accept tens of thousands of unnecessary violent deaths every year, to stop pretending we aren’t a part of the problem. Because we are.