Faith Works 6-10-22

Faith Works 6-10-22
Jeff Gill

Hate crimes on a very personal level
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There are so many directions the debate over guns and evildoers and crime and restrictions and liberty are going right now.

As a Christian minister, a preacher of the Gospel, I don't tend to find political guidance to be terribly useful in seeking faithfulness. And there's no getting around a great deal of political infighting over how the national conversation is being staged, one "side" versus another.

But as I said last week about securing one's firearms, there are certain guidelines that I believe preach quite well in a simple plea for holiness and godliness. There are faithful teachers and preachers who say guns are part of Christian living, and equally honorable ones who point to Jesus in the garden as he was betrayed (among other texts) as suggesting that non-violence or at least not owning weapons is closer to walking in the Lord's footsteps.

Either way, being careful of endangering others, taking steps to protect the innocent, and accepting responsibility even when you didn't create the problem . . . that all sounds pretty Christlike to me, and I can preach that.

There's another aspect of the debate that I'd reframe from a pastoral angle. Because the common private possession of guns, especially handguns, has been a factor in my attempts to provide pastoral care on a number of occasions, most of which never made the evening news. They did become major episodes in trying to help counsel and pray and minister to hurting persons who needed to find their way into a better place.

These were suicides, and the pastoral pain was in talking to someone who had given or sold or loaned a pistol or revolver or semi-automatic handgun to a friend or acquaintance who then used it to take their life.

You see, we may have an unconscionable 45,000 or so gun deaths in the US each year, but year by year a majority, sometimes up to over 60% of all of those deaths are suicides. Having so many of these kinds of guns laying around all over the place makes suicide easier, more certain, and I cannot but think more common.

In our country, hate crimes are indeed heinous, and 50 or so deaths due to bias and hate are horrible (there are perhaps thousands of acts deemed hate crimes each year, but as best as I can tell from Pew Research and other fairly reliable sources the deaths from hate crimes rattles around 50 — we'll see how 2022 turns out). But 24,000 and more deaths are due to self-hate. Self-hate, in the sense of wanting to extinguish one's self.

And how many of the mass shootings we are locked in heated public arguments about are to one degree or another an act of intended suicide, as much as aimed at any particular death toll or target?

There's a grim calculus around what's more awful: to kill one person then yourself, or a public space filled with people taken down and then yourself? The utilitarian mathematics says two is less terrible than, say, twelve, but it's the essential desire to kill yourself after killing others that feels like a black hole of dreadful mystery that is functionally equivalent. In either case, many of us ask "why not just kill yourself if that's your goal?" And I don't know anyone who has a clear understanding of what drives a person one way, or another, because even self-hate imposed only on one's self is a deep mystery and rippling sorrow all on it's own.

Numbers don't tell us much, then. But the tens of thousands of deaths by gun, by one's own hand, along with a couple tens of thousands shot by another, have brought us to this place as a community. How do we lift up the depressed, protect the innocent, ensure common rights, and preach good news, all without one stepping on the other?

The reality is that the public marketplace is a loud and jostling space where toes get tromped on and people continue to confuse volume with accuracy in a shouted conversation. What I want to speak up for, in the name of gentle Jesus, are those struggling with mental illness and personal pain to where they become convinced the world is better off without them.

How to sort out those who decide to kill others on the way from those who are intent on a more personal departure is beyond me. But I doubt we'll figure much more out about it until we start taking mental health more seriously as a health need for everyone.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not a doctor or a clinician, not that it keeps him from having opinions. Tell him yours at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.