When Americans Love Guns More Than People

We had another mass shooting yesterday.

This time it took place at a parade celebrating a Super Bowl champion.

But the details of the terror attack are almost irrelevant: not because the circumstances aren’t unthinkable or the horrors aren’t real or because the lives taken or torn apart don’t matter—but because this is the nation we now exist in: one where the frequency and severity of gun violence is so commonplace that we’ll soon need to attend to the next slaughter.

We barely have time to process or grieve one tragedy when we will have our attention abruptly pulled to to another occasion where the bodies of innocent human beings are violated by waves of bullets, and more radiant, beautiful lives are snuffed out by weapons of mass carnage.

And once again we’ll be greeted by cheap thoughts and prayers platitudes and by the justifications, misdirection, defenses, and inaction of family members, friends, neighbors, and strangers whose advocacy unfathomably is for the guns and not the people murdered with them. For many who regularly trumpet that they are pro-life, will find life suddenly of little interest.

Millions of Americans now love guns more than people, and the rest of the world and decent human beings here are wondering how such a thing happens.

It happens when a political party has become so beholden to the NRA and to those who profit off the sale of weapons, its leaders are rendered morally neutered and sickeningly silent in the face of our nearly daily mass murders.

It happens when a toxic religion of fear has been so ingrained in the minds of the faithful, they can no longer recognize the disconnect between middle finger-flying, gun-wielding bravado—and the humble, compassionate healer Christ they claim to be devoted to.

It happens when human beings become so desensitized to mass slaughters in schools, shopping malls, and churches, that they can no longer find the capacity or reason to grieve them, especially when that grief is adversarial to their politics or threatens their legislative hold on the homeland.

Most of all, this deadly and mystifying disconnect between supposed Christians and violence, occurs when Americans begin to treasure guns more than those murdered with them.

Honestly, I am so sick of being surrounded by these people. I don't think I'm alone.

I think millions of people of faith, morality, and conscience, simply cannot comprehend how the cause of guns became to so many of our families, friends, and neighbors—the solitary hill they will gladly die (and kill) on.

We cannot fathom how this became their greatest passion: not the poor or the hungry, not inequity or injustice, not pollution or climate change, not education or healthcare or anything remotely redemptive.

We don't know why they feel compelled to plaster guns on their bumpers and their chests and profiles, in "Come and Take them" taunts and threats that project some antagonistic bullying provocation that looks nothing like Jesus.

Yet, the saddest part, is that these people wouldn't be able to answer at this point, anyway. Once you're trapped inside an addiction you aren't able to see it clearly—and Conservative Americans are in the throes of a complete dependency on guns that has fully addled them.

Until they can be shaken out of the intoxicating high they get when they brandish military-grade weaponry, we're going to see more and more of this sickening, infuriating gun advocacy and less and less concern for lives taken with guns.

Until these people are able to actually dig deep enough to ask why they care so much about having their arms around a barrel and fingers on a trigger, they're going to be ignoring mass shootings and defending vigilantes and opposing gun control legislation and posturing for unconscionable holiday photos.

And greeted with the next mass murder here (which is never far away) the rest of us who love people more than guns, are going to have to endure living alongside them—and to keep fighting for all our lives.