Independence Day, Tribe and Guns

Independence Day, Tribe and Guns

Rev. Linda Simmons

July 3, 2016

Sebastion Junger in his book Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging writesabout soldiers and civilians living in war and about those living through tragedieslike 9/11. He tells us that what happens during these times is that class, gender, education status, race, ethnicity all disappear and are replaced with what he calls tribal mores that heal wounds in us that need healing. He names these as listening, sharing, caring, taking care of each other, allowing the needs of the group to supersede the needs of individual.

Junger postulates that crisis returns us to rituals of tribe that once ruled our lives, of belonging to something larger than our egos and singular identities that we are so often trapped in, and in doing so, offers us healing.

Not that war was not endemic to tribe, just that war had a place and a time and when it was over, the warriors came home, were honored, were re-integrated, were given roles that mattered to the tribe after having distinguished themselves in caring for the tribe on the battlefield.

Junger writes that now we relegate our warriors to the annals of the forgotten, the mentally ill, the overly traumatized and put them, if they are lucky or as Junger would say unlucky, on long term disability. Junger adds that some soldiers can be too wounded to return to society, but most want deeply to be needed, to be wanted, to be valued, to be heard, to offer a service that is essential to our going on well.

Junger reminds us that we all need to feel necessary, something that the tribe excelled at offering each of us. He writes, “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”[1]

We live in a society where personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good, where technologies seem to give rise to much good but along side that is something he names as “brutalizing to the human spirit.”[2]

Gary and I went to see the movie Newtown during the film festival. It was all that you can imagine it was. The film focuses on 3 families who lost a child in the Sandy Hook school shootings. One of the families, Mark and Jackie Barden, attended the screening and were invited, along with the producers, to speak with us at the end of the film.Hearing Mark Barden say the name of their child lost to this senseless murder, little Daniel he said, stunned the breath from the body.

One of the children who was murdered was shown on the cover of that movie, running on a grassy lawn, trying to race the bus to the corner as he did every day, his legs and arms all akimbo, a huge smile on his face, waving to his father who took the picture.

It is unconceivable. The same weapon, the AR-15, was used in that shooting was used in the shooting in Orlando on June 12thand in the 2012 Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting that killed 12 and injured 58.

The national ban on the sale of rifles like the AR-15 and the SIG Sauer MCX expired in 2004, and it hasn't been renewed.But since Newtown, there’s been a wave of legislation at the state level, including restrictive new laws on semi-automatic weapons in California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey & Washington DC that the Supreme Court recently did not intervene in dismantling.[3] This is good news. Military personnel are joining this fight to say that semi-automatic weapons have no place in civilian life.[4]

The debate on gun violence is enormous and multi-faceted. This debate is not about dismantling the second amendment. It is about gun violence gone rampant. It’s about implementing the second amendment in a way that allows us all to live with more sanity and security. Many people who own guns support background checks and the ban on semi-automatic weapons.

No one in my opinion speaks about this more eloquently than President Obama. I turn now to his remarks on gun safety reform in January of this year when he made an executive action on gun control.[5]Using executive action to move on gun controlcomes with substantial legal limits.

The US Constitution only grants the power of lawmaking to Congress, not the President. All of the recommendations below have to be made into law by Congress.

Obama first addressed the need for background checks, which are currently required of all gun stores. The problem is that afelon can buy a weapon over the Internet with no background check, no questions asked. A recent study found that about one in 30 people looking to buy guns on one website had criminal records.Obama tells us these are individuals convicted of serious crimes -- aggravated assault, domestic violence, robbery, illegal gun possession.

Everyone who buys a gun should have a background check, no matter where they buy it. Ninety percent of Americans support that idea. But it failed in the Senate.

Obama noted that after Connecticut passed a law requiring background checks and gun safety courses, gun deaths decreased by 40 percent. Meanwhile, since Missouri repealed a law requiring comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, gun deaths have increased to almost 50 percent higher than the national average.

Obama also proposed providing more resources for mental health care and making sure that federal mental health records are submitted to the background check system.

Obama went on to say that no one is suggesting that all guns be removed from anyone’s homes or hands but that we institute the Second Amendment responsibly and accountable. And here he needs to be quoted directly:

“Second Amendment rights are important, but there are other rights that we care about as well. And we have to be able to balance them. Because our right to worship freely and safely –- that right was denied to Christians in Charleston, South Carolina.And that was denied Jews in Kansas City. And that was denied Muslims in Chapel Hill, and Sikhs in Oak Creek. They had rights, too.

“Our right to peaceful assembly -– that right was robbed from moviegoers in Aurora and Lafayette. Our unalienable right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -– those rights were stripped from college students in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine, and from first-graders in Newtown. First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun.

“And, yes, it will be hard, and it won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen during this Congress. It won’t happen during my presidency. But a lot of things don’t happen overnight.

A woman’s right to vote didn’t happen overnight. The liberation of African Americans didn’t happen overnight. LGBT rights -- that was decades’ worth of work. So just because it’s hard, that’s no excuse not to try.”[6]

Democrats staged a sit in on the floor of the house beginning June 22nd for 25 hours. Their requests were not brought to vote: Deny firearms to terrorists, expand the use of background checks before purchase of firearms.

How did we get here, to a debate in which the President of the United States says that the NRA and gun lobbyists are determining the outcome? How did we get to a place in which the right to own a gun could be defined in such a way as to outweigh the right to go to school in safety, to attend church without fear, to take your sweetheart to the movies, to dance with abandon, to pray?

Mike Weisser has some thoughts about that. He runs a blog called Mike the Gun Guy and describes himself as a “gun nut beyond all gun nuts.” He joined the N.R.A. when he was eleven years old, a budding sportsman with a rifle for sport shooting.

He later worked in his uncle’s gun business building revolvers, sold guns wholesale to law enforcement, and eventually opened a retail shop. He’s also an N.R.A.-certified firearms instructor, and was interviewed by theNew Yorkerstaff writer Evan Osnos for hisrecent story on the business and politics of selling guns. Osnos found that Weisser has an unusual position: while he’s in favor of gun rights, he also writes criticallyabout the N.R.A. and how it works to create a climate of fear to advance its agenda.[7]

Mike starts his interview by quoting some statistics about guns. Some 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and 26,819 people were injured.

Mike joined NRA when he was 11 years old. Then it focused on sports shooting and hunting. In the mid 80s, the NRA shifted people’s attention to crime. The idea that people needed guns to protect themselves against criminals grew as racial anxiety grew. This is when the NRA began pushing for concealed carrying.

The culture of the industry changed and continues to play on people’s fear of the other coming to get us. Wayne LaPierre head of the NRA, in a public broadcast, talks about crime and fear and how gangs have all the guns that they want and that law abiding citizens live in fear and the only way to be safe is to be armed.

Mike says there’s no reality to any of this, that this is a rallying call to marshal fear and a patriotism that is about defending an America that is under attack with weapons, including assault weapons. They paint America as a battlefield.

Mike the gun guy goes on to say that what is really coming out through the immigration debate is fear of people who are unlike us and the need for guns to protect ourselves from them. The fear of the Muslim terrorist is one that is on the rise and played by the NRA and our media and politicians in an endless barrage.

I enjoyed listening to this interview with Mike the Gun Guy. He helped me understand that one can love guns, own guns and understand that limits are necessary for all of our freedoms to be protected well.

According to a study by the New America Foundation, white American men are the biggest terror threat in the United States. The Washington-based research organization did a review of “terror” attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and found that most of them were carried out by radical anti-government groups or white supremacists.[8]

But we have to be careful of this statistic too. We cannot create another Other of white American men, another category of people to hate, to point our fingers at, to classify, to blame, to ostracize. We are the people. And the solution lives in us just as clearly as the problem does.

To be independent, to live into the great promise of this nation, means that we must here and now accept the extraordinary responsibility of freedom. We have the freedom to vote, to change the way business is done, to put pressure on the gun lobby, to notice with compassion and non-violent witnessing when one of us turns inward so deeply that we begin to threaten ourselves and others.

Mark Barden, The Sandy Hook parent who was at the Newtown movie discussion group, told us that the Sandy Hook killer planned that rampage for over a year. He wondered out loud how many times in that year there might have been to change his course. Many of the Sandy Hook parents have created a non-profit called Sandy Hook Promise which is training students in schools how to listen to other students and to talk to adults about what they hear. They have already stopped one school shooting using this program. These same parents are in the process of suingBushmaster Firearms and Remington right now for the sale of AK-15s to the Sandy Hook Killer.

A judge will hear arguments about whether the case has legal merit to proceed to trial. Mark Barden asked during the pre-trail, "How does a kid around the corner get his hands on a weapon that was designed for killing large amounts of people in a short amount of time on the battlefield?"[9]

Sebastian Junger’s primary question in his book on called Tribe is this: How can we replicate the community of caring that happens in war and in the aftermath of tragedy outside war or tragedy?

I translate that question in this way: How can we define our freedom, our independence in such a way as it asks of us all that we give more than we know how to give, that we offer of ourselves more than we have been taught to offer, that we reach out to each other more than we remember how to reach out?

We are free to care for each other, to act, to petition, to speak out, to assemble, to make our wishes known. From the vigil we held at the Meeting House here after the shooting in Orlando, we formed a group called Make it Stop meeting on Thursday, July 7th from 6-7pm in Hendrix Hall to consider what we can do as an island people to make a difference in the gun violence debate. We would love to see you there.

We are the people. The Declaration of Independence closes with these words:

[A]s Free and Independent States, (we) have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

It is signed by 56 people. I read and counted each name after reading them the other day, pausing on each name and imagining what each one of them risked in signing there names to that radical document.

Let us pledge mutually to each other our lives, our sacred honor, our fortunes when our fortunes are our futures, and ability to live into them with less terror ripping through our land and make a difference in what should no longer be a debate. Let us raise our voices and our love and our very beings so that when it is our turn to be counted, they know our names and they count us among those who did what we could to protect, care for and honor our people.This is our tribe. We are all necessary. Amen.

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[1] Sebastian Junger, Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Hatchett Book Group, 2016), xvii.

[2] Junger, 93.

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[6] Ibid.

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[9]The Comment