Guns and the Ten Commandments By Roger Lovette Issue 029 p. 24

Guns and the Ten Commandments
By Roger Lovette

Sometime ago I watched a Nightline debate on television. The people in Jonesboro, Arkansas were talking to the citizens in Littleton, Colorado. It had been almost a year since the killings in the Jonesboro schools. The wounds and grief of Littleton were still fresh. Ted Koppel interviewed parents, school officials, and students about school violence and the grief and pain experienced in both those communities. Shortly after that program aired, violence broke out closer to my home in a high school in Conyers, Georgia. Since then the school systems across the nation have been trying to deal with the complicated problems of how to make schools safe for all those concerned.

Obviously, we ought to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people. For the first time in years the country is forcefully saying that the casual availability of guns by high school students is terribly wrong. The politician's response to the outcry of the people? They have opted for religion, or at least for the “form of godliness,” saying “Let’s put the Ten Commandments on the walls of every public classroom in America.”

Did I miss something? One minute we are talking about the regulation of handguns, parental concerns, and safe schools, and suddenly the conversation has shifted. We now debate about the advisability of putting the Ten Commandments right up there next to George Washington in every classroom.

In the counseling room, people change the subject when the anxiety gets too high. What has nailing the Ten Commandments to the schoolhouse walls to do with gun control legislation? A lot. If we spend our time arguing about the pros and cons of having the Ten Commandments in schools, gun control can be buried in the shuffle. This debate is not accidental. It is intentional. Much of it is a gun lobby ploy.

Representative Bob Barr of Georgia has been quoted as saying that if schools had been allowed to display the Ten Commandments before all the school shoot‑ups, "We would not have the tragedies that bring us here today." I beg to disagree. There are no easy answers to this problem. We will discover no quick fixes for violence in our schools. Locking up all the guns will not solve our problems but careful legislation might just be a start.

The Bill recently before the House of Representatives would reduce the time allowed for criminal background checks of buyers at gun shows. The Senate's proposal asked for a three-business-day waiting period. The amended Bill in the House recommended a twenty‑four‑hour waiting period instead. Gun shows have big turnouts on weekends. There would be no time for background searches of those buyers with the passage of this bill. By shifting the subject to a discussion of the Ten Commandments we are manipulated to forget guns, waiting periods, and violence. Quibbling about religion is politically safer than dealing with the hard decisions of gun legislation.

Maybe you remember the story of the game hunter who bragged that the first hippo he ever shot had been dead three days. We have a long history in this country of shooting at safe targets. This is, of course, much safer than going after wild, charging monsters.

The Ten Commandments are the steel that holds the structure of our culture together. Yet these Commandments were not given to divert our attention from the hard issues of human existence. A careful look at the Commandments forces us to deal with some serious flaws in our culture, flaws like idolatry and greed and covetousness. Dr. Martin Marty, church historian, has said that his complaint with posting the Ten Commandments in public classrooms is that then we have the law without the gospel. The two primary commandments are that we are to love God and that we are to love our neighbor. In all this talk about Commandments, we ought not to forget the intent of our Judeo-Christian forebears. These Commandments are always to be viewed through the prism of loving God and neighbor. The lessons of Kosovo are too raw and painful to ignore. Religion should never be used to clobber, divide, or divert us from the hard work that we are obligated to do in our time. Loving God and our neighbors includes hammering out effective gun control and a multitude of other concerns, endlessly challenging.

When we aim, let's shoot at live hippos. The gun debate will not go away as long as there is gun violence in our communities and especially gun violence in our schools. Maybe that’s why this debate about what goes on our schoolhouse walls is of truly profound importance. Dare we consider hanging pictures, lots of pictures, of dead kids, teenagers with smoking guns, graduations turned into memorial services, and grief-stricken parents. Such painful reminders might just turn our hearts back to our real enemies and the real values inherent in the Ten Commandments. The wonderful dream of God's great prophets was that “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid….” The enemies of that dream are alive and well and have yet to be effectively confronted.

Updated Thursday, December 14, 2000