Dear Reader,
If you read last Friday’s post, you know I was hoping for a certain picture of my two youngest with my friends, Richard and Annette, who were part of the Europe trip I took 35 years ago. Well, the moment happened (as did the picture), and oh, how I wish I could have been there!
The girls got home last night. Megan and I are looking forward to hearing more about their England trip, particularly since we just made the decision to cancel ours to northern California next week. With gas prices and inflation being what they are (as well as a second—and even longer—trip to Georgia on the calendar in August), we would blow our summer travel budget (and then some) if we went. This is par for the course for us when it comes to vacations; the few we've taken have always been cursed, so we'll deal. We live in a pretty place, have food to eat, jobs to work, and access to the Internet to live vicariously through friends’ vacations.
For those who have asked about the flooding in Montana, all’s well here in Boz Angeles, but it’s a mess further east and south in Yellowstone. Folks are banding together, though, as they do. For those in the Midwest, be warned: there’s a lot of water coming your way.
Wherever you happen to be this summer, thanks as always for reading Second Drafts.
Craig
PS: This week’s newsletter is good but long. Gmail clips emails at 102K, so you may need to continue reading it in your browser (just click “View Entire Message” at the end of the email).
Hot Takes
In this week’s Hot Takes, here’s news not prominently reported in the mainstream:
“As Roe Clock Ticks, Press Avoids News about Another Big Story – Attacks on Catholic Churches” - Anyone remember a time when fair news reporting had to do with covering both sides of a story? Me neither. Here’s the latest bias I’ve noticed:
“There have been at least 41 incidents of attacks against churches and crisis-pregnancy facilities since the May 2 leak of the Supreme Court draft decision that revealed the potential fall of Roe v. Wade.
The attacks have included property theft, vandalism, arson and property destruction.
How do we know this? A front page New York Times investigation this past Sunday?
No.
A round-up story in The Washington Post, USA Today, the Associated Press? Coverage on CBS, CNN or another major network?
No, no, no and, alas, no.
We know this because of The Washington Stand, which is described as the Family Research Council’s ‘outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview.’ In other words, these events are ‘conservative’ niche news (as opposed to, let’s say, attacks on ‘sanctuary movement’ churches because of their activism on immigration).”
In case you’re interested, here’s a PDF of all 41 stories (with links—notice the lack of major news networks). As we get closer to the actual SCOTUS decision later this summer, and as we have a President already seeming to normalize violence while considering a series of executive orders should Roe vs. Wade be overturned, look for more of this non-coverage to be what passes for all the news that’s unfit to print.
“Bill Maher: NY Times 'Buried' Kavanaugh Assassination Attempt Story” - I’d heard a little about this on talk radio, but my friend, Seth Hurd of The Five, found a good link:
“Bill Maher, host of ‘Real Time,’ went after The New York Times for burying the headline regarding the assassination attempt of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. While the story was shared as a teaser, which directed readers to page A-20, the prominent stories running on the front page included mentions of Jan. 6, the recall of left-wing San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, an update on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how the word ‘woman’ is being struck from the abortion debate.”
One can’t even begin to imagine the outrage if the targeted Justice would have been any of the liberal or female (other than Amy Coney Barrett) Justices. It seems the legal system is (perhaps) taking things more seriously, indicting the man on one count of “Attempt to Assassinate Justice of United States,” according to a court filing, the punishment for which (a violation of 18 U.S.C Section 351(c)), is life in prison.
On Tuesday (a whole month after the picketing and parading illegally began), the House passed a largely bi-partisan bill to increase security for families of Supreme Court justices, with the only “no” votes being from Democrats. The bill goes to the President’s desk, which he will presumably sign (not that you’ll read much about it).
Shoot! Here We Go Again
In the wake of recent shootings (mass and ongoing in Chicago), seemingly everyone and his dog has written about gun violence in America. Since a few readers have asked what I think, and as I’ve been trying to figure out what I think as a non-gun owner who has upheld the Second Amendment for the better part of my adult life, the time has come for me (and my dog) to do the same.
But you know I can’t just give you three points and a poem as to what I think and why. Instead, let’s look at the issue through the lens of a musical, because if something can’t be understood in a musical (in this case, Assassins by the late and legendary composer, Stephen Sondheim), can it really be understood at all?
Motives, Not Guns
“Someone tell the story, someone sing the song.
Every now and then, the country goes a little wrong.Every now and then a madman’s
Bound to come along.
Doesn't stop the story, story’s pretty strong.
Doesn't change the song.”—The Balladeer in “Ballad of Booth”
This past Saturday, I listened for the first time to the original cast soundtrack from Sondheim’s 1990 musical, Assassins. I had a ticket for a matinee performance put on by The Verge Theater here in Bozeman on Sunday, so I wanted to at least have an idea of what the show and the music might be about.
I’d not been to a Verge production before, but I knew enough from their reputation and website that they don’t do your everyday Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. In addition to having a volunteer “intimacy coach,” an “equity and race consultant,” as well as a program catering to prisoners “experiencing” incarceration (like it’s a state of mind?), The Verge as an organization is way more political than the good old Jacksonville Theatre Guild at the Sophie Leschin Theatre (may she rest in peace), where I pounded the summer stage in shows like Shenandoah, 1776, and Vaudeville. While I was not surprised by the program notes including this over-the-top short poem by Brian Bilston, I was surprised by the group’s (incorrect) assumption of Sondheim’s authorial motives for his musical. From The Verge directorship:
“Assassins was first performed off-Broadway in 1990 and took a shocking and completely satirical approach to America’s gun violence problem, back when mass shootings were still shocking. When we chose the show this winter, we had no idea we would be staging it on the heels of the recent wave of mass shootings, but we knew that gun violence was a particularly American pandemic that wasn’t going away.”
The assumptions here are two-fold: 1) mass shootings today are no longer shocking; 2) the presumption that they were more shocking in the 1990s was what motivated the composer to address them. On the contrary, Sondheim’s “approach” had little to do with America’s gun violence; with Assassins, he was digging at its roots. According to authorized biographer Meryle Secrest’s book, Stephen Sondheim: A Life,
“The idea [of writing a musical about assassinations] had begun to germinate, as had so many others, some years before he did anything about it. About a decade earlier he [Sondheim] had acted as a judge for entries by young playwrights to the Musical Theatre Lab founded by Stuart Ostrow, and one of the scripts he read was by Charles Gilbert. Its title was Assassins.
He said, ‘I looked at the title and thought, ‘What a great idea for a musical.’ Gilbert had based his play on a book about assassins and the intense feelings of desperation and alienation they had expressed during court proceedings.”
Secrest then introduces Sondheim collaborator John Weidman, elaborating that,
“At first Weidman and Sondheim took the long view, going back to the assassins of Julius Caesar and incorporating Charlotte Corday. ‘It was going to be an epic piece: what does it mean to kill a political figure?’ The field proved to be so well populated that the authors had to keep eliminating categories and finally narrowed the cast of characters to Presidential assassins: [John Wilkes] Booth, who killed Lincoln; [Charles] Guiteau [who assassinated Garfield]; Leon Czolgosz, who murdered William McKinley; Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to kill President-elect Franklin Roosevelt; Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin; Samuel Byck, who tried to kill Richard M. Nixon; Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who both shot at Gerald Ford on different occasions; and John Hinckley, who wounded Ronald Reagan.”
Secrest goes on to quote Weidman:
“Men and women who had attempted to kill Presidents believed that everyone had a right to happiness, not just to its pursuit. When their dreams, however delusory, were not fulfilled, they looked for someone to blame. ‘These are the stalkers with a grievance.’ Each had his own story to tell, but taken together they were alienated and disaffected, acting out their rage and turning it on the most tempting of targets. ‘There is a lot to be learned from looking at them,’ Weidman said.”
True, but political appropriation in the name of gun violence wasn’t one of them:
“Sondheim shared Weidman’s political perspective—he characterized himself as a ‘fierce liberal’—but was not attracted to the subject for this reason alone. ‘One of my [Sondheim’s] objections to [German playwright Berntolt] Brecht is that it’s always politics to the forefront and the characters to the rear, and what I hope we have done with Assassins is to put the characters to the forefront and the political and social statements all around.”
Consider these lyrics sung by Guiteau in “Gun Song”:
“When you think what must be done,
Think of all that it [a gun] can do:
Remove a scoundrel,
Unite a party,
Preserve the Union,
Promote the sales of my book,
Insure my future,
My niche in history,
And then the world will see
That I am not a man to overlook!
Ha-ha!”
Or this chorus from “Unworthy of Your Love,” as sung by Hinckley and Fromme to their respective loves (Jodie Foster and Charlie Manson), whom they tried to impress:
“Let me prove worthy of your love.
I'll find a way to earn your love,
Wait and see.
Then you will turn your love to me,
Your love to me.”
Motives, not guns, were Sondheim’s focus in Assassins, as further evidenced in this in-depth January 27, 1991, review with him and Weidman in the New York Times. Instead, the musical then (as The Verge’s excellent production of it does now), brings out some of what lies beneath the act of acting out. Despite the swing-and-a-miss as to Sondheim’s goals, The Verge directorship gets the following perfectly right:
“Today, this show hits very close to home. It underscores how important belonging is to us, and how many aspects of our modern society fail to satisfy this need. This show is a warped carnival ride through the dark side of the American Dream…
…So why stage this play now? Because until we come to terms with who we are—who we truly have become as Americans—we won’t be able to rebuild a society which fulfills its promise of liberty and justice for all. It’s a reminder that we can reach out in compassion and kindness today, without waiting for the powers that be to act.”
Or as The Balladeer sings in “Another National Anthem,”
“There are those who love regretting,
There are those who like extremes,
There are those who thrive on chaos
And despair.
There are those who keep forgetting
How the country’s built on dreams.”
And what do “those” sometimes do when they forget or lose hope in their dreams? They may become desperate, pick up a gun, and commit murder on a mass scale.
Desperation and Depravity
It’s here that we need to talk about guns, which on the heels of the previous sentence, may have the anti-gun crowd saying, “See! If there are no guns, no one would get killed.”
Maybe. Or maybe not.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t know. We don’t know what’s going on (what’s really going on) deep in the hearts and minds of others. So, when someone “goes crazy” and kills, we scramble for a way to explain it. We’re shocked by the frequency and the extent to which these modern murderers go to channel desperation, but that’s because we don’t have (or want to have) a developed enough doctrine of human depravity.
For those whose theological and/or political tradition says humankind is essentially “good” or even “neutral,” it’s no wonder there is shock and surprise when a lone gunman goes off. Blame has to be assigned somewhere, but it can’t be the shooter’s fault (at least not completely); it has to be the gun and the fact that he could get one.
For others (like me) who believe we are born totally and morally depraved, it’s not that we’re not surprised by a deadly action taken; on the contrary, apart from God’s sovereign subduing of evil, we’re actually surprised it doesn’t happen more. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to take steps to keep such horror from happening, but we recognize that the problem has much more to do with the person at hand, not just the weapon in hand.
According to a February 2022 National Institute of Justice study of mass shootings,
“Persons who committed public mass shootings in the U.S. over the last half century were commonly troubled by personal trauma before their shooting incidents, nearly always in a state of crisis at the time, and, in most cases, engaged in leaking their plans before opening fire. Most were insiders of a targeted institution, such as an employee or student. Except for young school shooters who stole the guns from family members, most used legally obtained handguns in those shootings.”
In other words (and as Sondheim’s musical so starkly illustrates) the shooters were/are “troubled.” One could make the argument (as David French attempts) that so-called “red flag” laws could keep guns out of the hands of (mostly) young males like these, but who can know when someone is about to break the law? To be clear, I don’t have a problem passing such legislation, but we’re not living in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (though some are concerned it’s coming), in which we accurately anticipate “pre-crime” and apprehend shooters before they shoot.
Murder is as old as Cain and Abel; the mass version of it is not going away, folks.
Our American Problem
That said, no one (at least no one intellectually honest) can argue that America does not have a bigger violence problem than many other countries. Rajiv Sethi is a professor of economics at Barnard College in New York City. His research centers on gun violence and possible innovative solutions to the problem. In an interview with Bari Weiss last week, he said,
“A lot of people who are in favor of gun control would like the kind of policy that Australia implemented after the Port Arthur shootings in 1996, which killed 35 people. That shooting led to an initiative that repurchased about 20% of existing guns, banned a large number of weapons, and implemented a 28 day waiting period. It was a very muscular policy. And the research shows that that was effective in reducing homicides and suicides in Australia quite substantially.
I think one of the reasons that the gun control debate involves so much paralysis and so much talking past each other and so much misunderstanding is partly because I think the advocates of gun control don't see why we can't just do something like that. Part of the reason is the following: I've been in the United States a very long time now, but it’s a gradual process of understanding my adopted country. One very important article that changed my perspective on these things was by Stanley Levinson in 1989 on the Second Amendment in the Yale Law Journal. It argued that the Second Amendment is actually part of a tradition in American society that is distrustful of authority, of government, of tyranny, and that it ought to be seen in that light, in conjunction with the other rights that are in the Constitution. So when you talk about policies that restrict the rights of legal gun ownership—even if it is banning assault weapons—people feel that it’s an infringement of a right that they have as Americans. And they will powerfully resist it being taken away from them. I think it’s important to understand that that’s a legitimate position. It may be a position that one disagrees with, but there is reasoning behind it. It’s part of an American political tradition.”
This, I think is the missing puzzle piece so many overlook as part of the answer to the question, “Why is America more violent than other countries?” I’m not saying it’s right, nor am I saying I take pride in the reputation, but the American tradition of defense—of country from tyranny, of family from intruder, of self from attacker—is deeply woven into the fabric of our nation and its people. And it’s a powerful narrative.
It’s also a dangerous one when taken too far. French (who is pro-Second Amendment) writes about what he sees as a shift from defense to defiance among gun owners:
“The threat to America’s gun culture comes from the gun rights movement itself. The threat is gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy…
…The concept of self-defense is rooted in a high view of human life. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, John Locke described a ‘fundamental law of nature’ (his description of the ‘will of God’) that man be ‘preserved as much as possible’ yet ‘when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred.’
Indeed, scripture makes multiple allowances for self-defense, in both the Old and New Testaments. While I respect Christian pacifism, I simply don’t see it required by the biblical text. My own view is that the refusal to protect innocent life can constitute a grave moral wrong. If a violent man came after my family, and I did not do everything in my power to stop his attack—even if it meant killing him to save my wife and kids—then I would have failed a profound obligation as a husband and father.
Defiance is different. It’s rooted in the will to power. It is designed to implant fear, not to save lives but to exert control. It contradicts a core value of a classically-liberal society, that change comes through courts and the ballot box, not through intimidation and fear.”
Who wants to break the news to the BLM rioters…or the January 6 “insurrectionists?”
Wishes for the Wondering
This post is already long, but if I had my druthers and a genie to grant them, I could get aggressive pretty fast with pro-gun crazies. A list of wishes for the wondering:
I wish America’s 120 guns for every 100 hundred citizens statistic (which is insane) could be significantly reduced; start by destroying guns that don’t belong to anyone (i.e. ones confiscated from crime scenes, etc.) and we could make a dent in that number.
I wish Wayne LaPierre and the NRA (one of the more corrupt and poorest-led lobbies in Washington) would go away for good; more and more hunter friends of mine say the juice is not worth the squeeze when it comes to membership. Then don’t renew!
I wish politicians—especially the conservative kind—would stop posing for pictures with guns in the hand of every member of their families. Remember this family photo? So fun, so festive, so frightening. If this is how they treat firearms indoors (which any of my gun friends will tell you is heinously), imagine their approach outside.
I wish politicians—this time the stupid kind—would stop making ridiculous Christian nationalistic statements that are unbelievably blasphemous to Scripture (not to mention to good taste). (Note: For a good piece to clear the palate from this garbage, read Elizabeth Bruenig’s excellent essay, “What a Gun Is For.”)
I wish that, instead of worshipping the golden gun, gun owners (many of whom are Christians) would sit down and give considered thought to the number of guns they own and why. This isn’t me saying you have too many; this is me asking if there’s something as to why you have so many? A gun habit may originate out of fear and insecurity, pride or power—none of which are biblical virtues—and might be something for serious prayerful consideration and repentance.
Some Practical Ideas
Look, I don’t have all the answers, and if it seems I’m trying to give that vibe, forgive me. I don’t own a gun and I’ve never (by the grace of God) been on the receiving end or affected by a mass shooting. But as I’ve thought about it all, here are some ideas that make sense to me (you can email me and let me know if they make sense to you):
Pass the “red flag” laws, but don’t make promises that they’re going to catch everyone and in time (false hope is also a killer). We will always have shootings.
I’m not convinced our current background checks are particularly lacking, but if there’s enough justification for another layer (especially for younger ages) that doesn’t penalize law-abiding gun owners and hunters, fine.
I don’t want to add unenforceable laws to the books, but upping the ante and holding parents more liable for weapon storage at home might be an incentive.
I’m intrigued with “smart gun” biometric technologies that prevent activation and use by anyone other than the owner (similar to how an iPhone can be locked and only activated by the person’s thumbprint or face scan can open it).
Megan wants a licensing period akin to obtaining a driver’s license—six months of instruction with proof of responsible use to get an initial permit. Okay.
Take down the silly signs outside of schools that say “Gun-Free Zone” and train and arm a select number of staff to act as needed. Have a limited amount of guns under lock and key (but accessible) on property should there be a situation involving an active shooter. Keep running active shooter drills, and for crying out loud, have only one point of entry and control it.
Finally (and this is not going to be all that popular for those playing at home), when there’s a mass shooting with obvious evidence and absolutely no question as to who did it (i.e. the one with all the guns left standing in the midst of a classroom or grocery store of carnage), there needs to be an immediate trial and, if found guilty, the immediate sentencing and carrying out of capital punishment. Contrary to popular belief, this is a pro-life argument appearing pre-Law in the scriptures in Genesis 9:6:
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”
God mandates the death penalty because the preciousness of life and the unjust taking of that life are so heinous as to make the murderer deserving of death. Want New Testament support? Look no further than Romans 13:3-4:
“For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.”
Mercy can always be an option, but we need a stronger, more swift societal deterrent for those considering so blatant and bold a slaughter of God’s human creation.
Fresh & Random Linkage
“Expressing Laughter Around the World: This Is How to Laugh Online in 26 Languages” - If you find yourself laughing online, here’s how to do it right.
“The Case for Mindful Cursing” - Posted more as an interesting study than an enabling endorsement. I’m always curious how emotions and words go together.
“Internet Explorer (Almost) Breathes Its Final Byte on Wednesday” - Happy trails.
Until next time.
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