April 29, 2012:

Ponderings of A PILGRIM Pastor

My father and I went duck hunting when I was a kid. Dad had a single-shot 16 gauge shotgun. As I grew older I was allowed to shoot it now and then. As I recall, the ducks were quite safe from us! While I knew that a few men in town went deer hunting in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula I never saw their rifles. The only other gun I saw in those days was the small 22-caliber pistol kept in the drawer of the teller in the Otsego Savings Bank. So far as I know it was never fired in anger.

Once when my father made a weekly trip to the "big bank" in Kalamazoo to get money for the Friday payroll at the local paper mill, my father’s boss, the bank president, insisted he take the pistol with him in case someone might try to rob him. When my father returned, he told the bank president he would never do it again. If a John Dillenger, armed and dangerous, held him up, he was more than welcome to the money. I learned from my father that nothing — not money, not the life of the potential robber, and certainly not your own life — is worth killing or being killed for.

How antique that all seems today. There are now more than enough guns in America for every man, woman and child. The National Rifle Association and its supporters have held hostage state and national legislators in order to increase the number of places guns — concealed or otherwise — can be purchased and carried. All this is justified by a serious mis-reading of the Second Amendment to the Constitution which authorizes the keeping of weapons by militias — National Guards and police — not individual citizens.

The growing number of people of all ages being shot and killed because of this madness is a national and international disgrace. How long will it take us to realize that handguns and assault rifles are not making us safer but far more at risk? Until one of our own family members or friends is killed? God help us.

Love,
Dave