Commentary
Shootings lift the veil on America's tragic flaw
by Gordon C. StewartThe Rev. Gordon Stewart is pastor of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska and a source in the Public Insight Network for MPR News.
If philosophical parsing of the meaning of Sandy Hook was inappropriate just a few days ago, it is mandatory now.
The slaughter of these dear little ones and their teachers was a moment of terrible and terrifying insanity. When Adam Lanza put on his body armor and turned his mother's guns on his own mother and Sandy Hook Elementary School, insanity broke out to bring grief and to chill the bones of everyone in America.
Today there are calls for gun control and mental health services, and those calls make perfect sense as practical responses. But they will not fix the problem.
There is a more profound collective insanity that pervades our culture and our nation. It's a tragedy in the sense of the old Greek and Shakespearean theater: a fatal flaw that is doing us in.
Sandy Hook was a symptom of the American tragedy: our worship of safety — arming ourselves to the nines — turns out to be the death of us. The idolatry of safety is the worship of death itself.
A five year old boy in Minneapolis is playing with his two-year-old brother in their parents' bedroom. He finds a loaded pistol, points it at his brother as one would point a toy gun. His brother is dead. The surviving five-year-old and his parents will never be the same — because a father sought to keep his family safe with the pistol under his pillow.
A mother in Newtown has guns in the home she shares with the disturbed son she loves and seeks to protect from a cruel world. Like so many others in America, the guns were purchased either for safety or for sport, but the results are the antitheses of safety or fun.
Whether in our bedroom at home or in the nation's Capitol, when the assurance of safety rises to the top of the pyramid of values, death ascends as the power that destroys. It is the fatal flaw in a natural human instinct toward safety and security.
Freedom and safety are basic human needs. They are American values. Each is important. But neither freedom nor safety is God. Neither one is worthy of enshrinement by itself. The two of them together make for a Molotov cocktail thrown back into our own bedrooms and schools — or any place the concern for safety unleashes the tragic flaw of Greek drama, or Shakespeare, or the American theater of the absurd.
Comments (7)
This is exactly right! We are too attached to being safe, when actually safety is an illusion, since we're all going to die someday. And your idea of the fatal Shakespearean flaw is apt. Until people realize that we can't control every circumstance just by having plenty of guns around, this type of thing will keep happening. It's really too bad that over half of America doesn't agree with you, and will continue to be attached to their guns. We live in a culture of violence, and until that changes, we're all in danger.
As an agnostic, this really spoke to me in linking our veneration of safety and security with the power of the forces beyond human control. Beautifully expressed and powerfully reasoned. I have found a new religious leader I deeply respect.
This is stupid. If Adam Lanza's mother were obsessed with safety, she'd have had a gun lock on her gun or had it in a safe. Same goes for your young boy example.
I think the problem is we in the US believe defense is an individual right rather than a collective responsibility. We won't give up means to defend ourselves, even when disarming everyone like Japan has done is statistically far more likely to protect us all. For us, giving up that right is just impossible. We not only have a right to self-defense, but a belief in it.
The best thing I heard on this topic was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on the Newshour. He said the profile of the mass shooters is the same -- young people who were bullied, were outcasts and needed mental health services.
Pay close attention to the comments from women. Therein, and over time , solutions will be revealed.
Safety has always been a need a mankind yet Mr. Stewart states that this is our downfall.
Man has a moral right to self-defense. It is immoral to deny that right. We often hear from the anti-gun crowd "if only one child could be saved..." well children are saved every single day by their parents, siblings and peace offices and neighbors who are armed. A firearm is a tool and like any tool has the potential for great good or great evil depending upon who is wielding the tool.
If we want to save children, then let's start by banning abortions. 1.4 million abortions a year are committed in America. Yet only 323 died from rifles of all types in 2011.
More people die from hammers (496 in 2011) than they do from rifles. Yet we focus on banning so called assault rifles which is an even smaller subset of rifles.
Where is the outrage over approx. 42,000 deaths a year by motor vehicles compared to only 600 accidental shooting deaths a year! Certainly it is tragic when a child dies as in the example Mr. Stewart cited. But the boy died not because of some mythical pursuit of safety as Stewart claims, but because his father BROKE THE LAW! Minnesota statute 609.666 (the devils' statute) requires all firearms be secured from access by children. The boys father did not do this. In fact police found another gun in the child's diaper bag.
If we want to have an honest discussion about ending psychopathic episodes - then let's start focusing on the pshycho and not the law abiding gun owner
How about reading the numerous stories where families have been protected from the violet criminals, who wish to assault them, by having a firearm at hand. In the future, only the criminals will have the guns and everyone else will be living under an umbrella of fear and tyranny. Our founding Gov't has already granted us the right to ownership and defend ourselves how we see fit.
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