Not Guns, But People With Guns

By Fr. John Rausch
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 5/24/07)

Virginia Tech University recently conferred 27 diplomas posthumously on the students killed in the April 16 shootings. The granting of degrees to those slain represented another step in healing the brokenness that gun violence brought to that campus.
Although the 32 deaths at Virginia Tech represented the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, commentators quickly recalled the 13 deaths at Columbine High School in 1999 and the five Amish girls killed in Pennsylvania last fall. Analysts ask: why?
Some shooters appear mentally disturbed, some loners, some rebellious and angry. The common thread: every one of the shooters had easy access to high-powered firearms.
The number of guns in the United States has quadrupled from 54 million in 1950 to over 222 million today including 76 million handguns. The United States far exceeds the industrialized nations in gun deaths because of its level of lethal firepower. More than 30,000 people die each year from gunshot wounds through murder, suicide and accidents.
However, the National Opinion Research Center reports that currently gun ownership continues to decline as support for firearms control rises, even after 9/11. Whereas in the mid-1970s, modern household gun ownership peaked at 55 percent, by 2006 that number dropped to 35 percent. Researchers suspect that fewer people hunt for recreation and, with a declining crime rate, fewer home owners buy guns for protection.
People of faith view violence in a holistic way. The U.S. Catholic bishops in their 1994 statement, “Confronting a Culture of Violence: A Catholic Framework for Action,” said, “Violence in our culture is fed by multiple forces ... We have to address simultaneously declining family life and the increasing availability of deadly weapons, the lure of gangs and the slavery of addiction, the absence of real opportunity, budget cuts adversely affecting the poor, and the loss of moral values.”
The root causes of violence challenge the very economic fabric of society. Poverty breeds violence. Lack of decent jobs seeds frustration. The widening income gap leaves those left behind feeling like losers. The forces of globalization with its outsourcing of middle income jobs and its undercutting of union strength diminish family life when the market demands more than one wage earner for the family to survive. Weakened family life invites the pseudo-security of gang membership, and additive substances offer a quick escape from harsh life choices and economic failure.
Society in general contributes to this moral breakdown by solving problems with violence. Abortion and capital punish appear as quick fixes. The U.S. military budget now ranks larger than the combined defense budgets of every other nation in the world, and our foreign policy makers rely more on the stick than negotiations, thus modeling problem-solving with violence.
Heavy doses of violence spew forth from the media, TV, movies and video games. Child advocates claim the average U.S. child views 12,000 to 15,000 murders on television by adolescence, and talk-radio regularly traffics in anti-black, anti-Arab, anti-gay and anti-female rhetoric that further coarsens society.
Fear of terrorism funds the arms manufacturers that ever increases the budget of the military. Fear for personal safety enriches the gun industry, while its lobbyists campaign to neutralize state and federal gun laws.
Then, when someone tragically murders multiple numbers of people at a school or mall, public analysis turns to mental health issues and psychopathic behavior — topics that need attention in our society without waiting for a violent act. Yet few acknowledge that the anti-social or psychotic behavior of the perpetrator caused such carnage and death, because he had such easy access to guns.

Fr. Rausch is a Glenmary priest who lives, writes and organizes in Appalachia.

(c) Copyright 2007 by Arlington Catholic Herald