Gun madness
A print of The Peaceable Kingdom hangs in many clergy offices. Painter Edward Hicks, a Quaker who lived from 1780 to 1849, loved the beautiful vision in Isaiah 11 of the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the kid, the calf and lion and fatling together with a little child leading them. The painting pricks my conscience every time I see it because of the enormous gap between its lovely vision of a peaceable kingdom and the reality of our world. In the world as we know it, as Woody Allen once quipped, when the lion and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up.
In recent weeks Americans have contemplated yet another mass killing. James Holmes, a 24-year-old dropout from the University of Colorado Medical School, walked into a crowded movie theater in Colorado, opened fire with three weapons—one of them an assault-style rifle—and killed 12 people, wounding dozens more. This type of disaster happens with such regularity in our country that we have almost become accustomed to it. The unthinkable has become commonplace.
Gun control activists suggest that we need a national conversation about the fact that we have more firearms per capita and more firearm-related deaths than any other country. But they are a voice crying in the wilderness. Few leaders seem interested. President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney expressed condolences for the families of the victims, but neither offered specific plans for controlling the plethora of guns among us—guns that are designed not for hunting and recreational target shooting, which I happen to enjoy, but for killing as many people as possible quickly and efficiently.
