Every so often, and now would be a good time, we as a nation
need to look again at our founding principles.
Right now, many people in our country are experiencing grief, anger, and/or
confusion in light of these two recent mass shootings.
In our pain, anger, and confusion, we want answers and
solutions, and we want them now. And
politicians may do something, and we hope they did the right thing, enough, to
prevent the next one.
Now the big push is for universal background checks, but
nobody has figured out yet if that would have made any difference in these two
shootings. Would these two shooters have
passed a background check, and were their guns recent purchases that a time
delay might have cooled heated emotions?
The fact is that guns have always been a big part of what
America is. The Second Amendment is a
part of the Bill of Rights, rights that our Founders believed to be unalienable
and given by God. Guns were also a big
part on why we are a free nation. We were
an “armed” people, unlike those in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings
and tyrants. (Federalist Papers no. 51)
But with freedom comes great responsibility. John Adams, our second President, said that “our
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of
any other.”
The court called supreme was wrong to remove God from the
public square and public schools, it was wrong to say that our government must
be neutral toward religion, and it was wrong to remove the Ten Commandments from
public life.
We used to teach our kids to love your neighbor as yourself,
and do unto others as you would have others do unto you. It takes religion to love your neighbors,
because that tells you that this other person is created in the image of
God. And it takes religion to stop people
from killing people, because religion makes people aware that they will give
account of their lives to their Creator when they leave this one.
If after almost 250 years of being a nation, guns are now a
problem, we have to look at what has changed in our country. And the answer is not; semi-automatic.