Faith in God, Faith in Guns

A chat with my nephew and an assassination got me thinking about responsibility.

I recently had a long and winding conversation with my 16-year-old nephew. He's a big supporter of the Second Amendment. He reckons guns useful for defending against heinous acts, terrible people, and a tyrannical government. That conversation, and Charlie Kirk getting assassinated three days ago, got me thinking about freedom, safety, and power.

I've always had fun shooting guns, but I've seen them as more of a danger than a solution. I could tell you about my papaw's guns or my stepfather's collection and all that shit politicians do to prove they get it, but I won't. I've killed two animals with a gun. A turkey and a lizard. I ate the turkey. The lizard still lives in my mind as a regret. I'm also a survivor of an attempted suicide. At 22, I went a little nuts and tried to end it all. I didn't have a gun, so I decided I'd leap a few stories to my death. Clearly, I lived. I spent months in bed and more in a wheelchair healing numerous broken bones. I still walk with a limp that's worse some days than others.

What's my point? My point is that it's clear that gun ownership has a few potential outcomes, and by and large they're not what my nephew pictures. The most likely thing to happen is nothing. You own it, you shoot it, you die of old age, and the gun lives on free of the stain of death. Beyond that, the probabilities get dark. The next most likely outcome is that the gun is used in a suicide or a homicide. The presence of a gun in the home makes that impulse—like the one I had—three to five times more likely to end in death. In fact, over half (56%) of all gun deaths in this country are suicides. After that, there's the chance it gets stolen—more than 1.8 million guns were reported stolen from individuals nationwide from 2012-2017, roughly 300,000 per year, and that's likely an undercount since most states don't require reporting gun thefts. These stolen guns feed the very criminal element people say they're arming themselves against.

Then, way down the list, is the chance you win the gun lottery and use it to defend yourself. The hard data on this is not what the gun lobby sells. In 2022, the FBI documented just 378 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens. Pitted against nearly 48,000 total gun deaths that year, it's a statistical whisper. Take the 2022 Greenwood mall shooting: A brave bystander stopped the killer after three deaths, a rare win in the data. But for every such headline, 127 gun deaths pile up—mostly suicides or street violence, not heroics. And let's not forget the profound irony: the primary reason you might need a gun for defense is because the other person has one, a danger amplified by the sheer number of guns in our society. So, what is the only rational, objective reason to own a gun? Because you want to. That's it. You feel like having them and shooting them is worth the cost of lives. It's a hard argument to defend, but it's an honest one.

The idea that those guns will hold back an authoritarian regime is even more of a fantasy. It seems obvious to me that whether a government is "tyrannical" is based entirely on perspective. During the American Revolution, John Adams estimated that only about a third of the colonists actively supported independence, with a third remaining loyal to Britain and the rest just trying to stay out of it. For a long time, the men we now call the Founding Fathers were considered terrorists and insurgents by the ruling power. Their legacy was determined by the outcome. When you're fighting a modern state armed with drones, mass surveillance, and the ability to shut off food and water to entire areas, the idea that your AR-15 is a meaningful check on that power is laughable. The right-wing folks who believe this would find themselves fighting the very police and military they claim to support, and they wouldn't be revolutionaries; they'd be more Timothy McVeighs.

This blind faith in guns as a solution is mirrored by another, deeper abdication of responsibility. We're always talking about personal responsibility in America—the idea that your station in life is entirely your own fault. But when it comes to our society's troubles, we collectively want to offload that duty onto a firearm or our preferred deity, and then wash our hands of the hard work. We see the bumper sticker that says "God is my copilot," but the prevailing attitude feels more like God is the pilot, and we are just passive passengers. Accidents avoided are His mercy, tragedies His will. I'm not anti-God. I'm anti-abdicating our own agency. Isn't the core of almost every faith the mandate to be better, to build a better society, to be good to one another? It's a call to action, not a permission slip to sit back and watch.

The early Christian church understood this. For the first few centuries, they were overwhelmingly pacifist. Tertullian, writing around 200 AD, scorched it plain: "Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? “Shall the Son of Peace take part in the battle?" Christians were executed for refusing military service. The cross was a symbol of state violence and suffering. Then, in the 4th century, the Emperor Constantine put that cross on the shields of his soldiers and began conquering in Christ's name. The message was inverted. Jesus's call to "turn the other cheek" wasn't a call to be a doormat; it was a radical strategy of nonviolent resistance, a way to assert one's humanity against an oppressor without mirroring their violence. We've traded that for a faith that justifies building castles with moats and defensive turrets.

The wild thing is, the best way to protect your family and defend democracy is by using the other amendments. The Second is the least useful for fighting state violence. People love to quote that the arc of history bends toward justice, but that's bad advice. It doesn't bend on its own; it is bent by immense effort and will. Fixing our country will take hard work—mental, emotional, and physical. We're told that if we take away guns, only criminals will have them, but this is a lie we've been fed. Countries like Australia, the UK, and Japan have shown that strong gun laws drastically reduce gun violence for everyone.

So here we are, the year of our Lord 2025, September the 13th. Three days after another political assassination. Blind faith in God and guns leaves us as passengers to our future, accepting 48,000 gun deaths a year as the cost of freedom. The only honest argument for guns is "because I want them," and the only honest faith is one that demands we get off our asses and bend that arc ourselves.

My nephew believes guns are the tool to keep us free. But freedom is not won by sitting with a gun on your nightstand, waiting for God to act or tyranny to strike. It's won the way it has always been: by bending that arc ourselves. God may have a plan, but I doubt it's one we're meant to watch from the sidelines.