The Oregon college
shooter undeniable targeted Christians during his shooting spree.
Attorney, David French,
a staff writer at National Review
asks: “With Christians explicitly targeted for mass murder, are we now going to
launch a round of anguished soul-searching about anti-Christian rhetoric? Will we cleanse political discourse of
anti-Christian expression? Will
militant, angry atheists be universally shamed into silence?”
We heard the national
conversation after other recent mass murders: the horrific 2011 shooting
that left six people dead and one congresswoman wounded in Tucson, AZ; the racist
massacre of a black Bible-study group in Charleston, SC.
If recent history is any
guide, in the days following an explicitly anti-Christian hate crime, the national
conversation centered mainly on gun control. The unmistakable rise of a particularly contemptuous
brand of discourse directed at Christians is a mere afterthought in the face of
the “real” issue: America’s failure to confiscate guns … like other countries.
Imagine if the gunman
had asked Muslims to stand before shooting them, what would the conversation
look like today? As French so pointedly
reminds us, “… we’re still talking about the brief detention of a young Muslim
student who made a clock look like a bomb. Will we talk about anti-Christian bigotry
after Roseburg as much as we discussed “Islamophobia” after Ahmed? I doubt it.”
In reality, these national
conversations are often hypocritical. No
rational person believes that the Tea Party caused the Tucson shooting; yet
that didn’t stop the Left from spending weeks browbeating the Right over its
political rhetoric. No rational person
thinks that a flag flying on the South Carolina capitol grounds caused the
Charleston murders; but CNN
transformed itself into the ‘Confederate News Network’ in a weeks-long crusade
against symbols of the historic South.
French states, “Here’s
the truth of many, if not most, American mass killings — there is, in this
nation of 320-million souls, a certain small number of evil young men who have
convinced themselves that the path to greatness lies over the bodies of the
innocent. Some of them hate African
Americans. Some of them hate Christians. Some of them hate indiscriminately. Finding these young men is like finding a
needle in a haystack, and it’s just as hard to deprive them of access to
weapons.”
Bottom Line: There is no
true ‘solution’ to men like this. Nor does
more gun control provide the answer. Short
of repeal of the 2nd Amendment and a large-scale, coercive confiscation of
America’s firearms — neither of which will ever take place — it won’t be hard
to find a gun in the United States.
Oregon, in fact, had
recently tightened its gun laws. It did
not save the victims at Roseburg. Even
in states with more-permissive gun laws, the vast majority of people don’t
carry a gun. But while we can’t know if
any of the Roseburg victims would have carried, we’ll never know if they could
have effectively engaged the gunman (if they did carry). But this we know: the school’s policy tightly
restricted their access to weapons; and that’s the core violation of individual
rights at the heart of gun-free zones — they effectively gut the citizenry’s
unquestioned right of self-defense, rendering Americans involuntarily
vulnerable.
French concludes: “While
the quest for answers after this shooting likely won’t lead to a national conversation
about Christianity, that doesn’t mean that we all have to brush past
yesterday’s realities. I woke up this
morning awed by the courage of men and women who stood and affirmed their faith
in the face of death itself.”
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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