Beating Guns

by Shane Claiborne

  Those are the lives lost. Sometimes we only count the casualties, but there are tens of thousands each year who are victims of gun violence and yet survive. An estimated seventy-three thousand people per year are injured by guns, many of them in life-altering ways.13 There are over four hundred thousand crimes involving guns each year.14 Young people from ages eighteen to twenty commit a disproportionate amount of gun violence, accounting for only 5 percent of the population but nearly 20 percent of homicide and manslaughter arrests.15 Young people—not old enough to buy beer or rent a car—are able to buy and carry guns.

  We have a problem.

  The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population, but we have almost half of the world’s privately held guns (42 percent).16 There are nearly five times more licensed gun dealers in America than there are McDonald’s restaurants.17 And those are just the licensed dealers.

  OVERSUPPLY AND OVERDEMAND

  (Note) We manufactured an average of 9,458,172 guns annually in the US from 2012 to 2015.

  That’s 25,912 per day.

  That’s 1,079 per hour.

  That’s 17.9 per minute.

  That’s 1 gun every three seconds.

  We have as many guns as people—maybe more. Recent data shows that we have around three hundred million guns in the United States, which is about one per person.18 Each year millions of new guns are added to the arsenal—in 2016, a record 27 million guns were sold.19

  We have a problem. We are addicted to guns. We are addicted to violence.

  But here’s an interesting caveat: even though we have as many guns as people, only 32 percent of US households have guns.20 So a small portion of people have a lot of guns. Three percent of our population owns half of those three hundred million guns, with an average of seventeen guns each.21 Nearly two-thirds of our guns are owned by 20 percent of gun owners.22

  It is largely a man’s obsession. Further, 61 percent of gun owners are white men, even though white males make up only 32 percent of the overall population.23

  And where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. This is the mess we find ourselves in.

  Read over the gun facts below. That’s a lot of bad news. But let’s put a face on it, as injustice is always personal, always has a name. After all, that’s what puts a fire in our bones and moves us to action.

  That Problem Has a Name

  I (Shane) will never forget the night we heard the gunshots outside. Sadly, it’s not uncommon to hear gunshots in Kensington, on the north side of Philly and where I’ve lived for twenty years. But these were close, so I ran to the door and found a young man falling to the ground in front of my house. I grabbed his hand, prayed over him, and held him until the ambulance came. The next morning we found out that he did not make it.

  His name was Papito. He was nineteen years old.

  We had a candlelight vigil, as we always do after someone is killed. But that didn’t feel like enough. We can tell kids not to shoot each other, but eventually we also start to ask deeper questions like, Where are they getting the guns?

  GUN FACTS

  (Note) The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population, but we have almost half of the world’s privately held guns (42 percent).

  One Black Friday, two hundred thousand guns were sold in the US. That means two per second.

  There are 170,000 guns for sale online.

  There are nearly five times more licensed gun dealers in America than there are McDonald’s restaurants.

  We hold the world record for the most civilian-owned guns—one hundred guns for every one hundred people, or about one per person.

  Guns kill about thirty-eight thousand people per year, and over half of those are suicides.

  Over one hundred people die from guns every day in America.

  There are seventy-three thousand gun-related injuries each year.

  There are over four hundred thousand crimes involving guns per year. That’s forty-five crimes involving guns every hour. Young people from ages eighteen to twenty commit a disproportionate amount of gun violence, accounting for only 5 percent of the population but nearly 20 percent of homicide and manslaughter arrests.

  The US leads the world in gun homicides. We have twenty-nine gun homicides per million people. The next most violent country when it comes to guns is Switzerland, with seven per million. So we have four times more gun violence than the next country. We have six times more gun homicides than Canada, and sixteen times more than Germany.

  Another source shows that we have thirty-six gun homicides for every one million people—the highest in the world. That’s twenty-five times higher than other high-income countries.

  When all the firearm deaths in all the developed countries of the world are tabulated, 80 percent occur in the United States. Of all the children killed by guns in the world’s twenty-three developed countries, 87 percent are US children.

  But here are some interesting caveats:

  Even though we have almost one gun per person in the US, only 32 percent of households have guns. That means some folks have a lot of guns. Three percent of the US population owns half the guns. The folks in that 3 percent own an average of seventeen guns each, a total of 133 million guns.

  Thirty-two percent of Americans are white men, but 61 percent of gun owners are white men.

  Sixty-five percent of guns are owned by 20 percent of gun owners. Fifty percent are owned by 3 percent of the total population.

  We have eleven gun deaths per one hundred thousand people. Japan has 0.07 per one hundred thousand.

  Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said that we are all called to be the good Samaritan and lift our neighbor out of the ditch, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to realize that we need to transform the whole road to Jericho. We’ve got to figure out why people keep ending up in the ditch.24

  When our community asked where the guns are coming from, we didn’t have to look far. About two blocks away was a gun shop called the Shooter Shop. It wasn’t just any gun shop. It was one of the worst gun shops in the country. What we know is that there are a few gun shops that are notoriously irresponsible. Over half the guns found at crime scenes are traced to 1 percent of gun dealers.25 Five percent of gun shops are responsible for 90 percent of guns used in crimes.26 The worst of the worst. The Shooter Shop was one of those gun shops.

  The Shooter Shop [The Simple Way]

  My friends and I on the block knew we needed to do something. We had held vigils and protests plenty of times before, at the Shooter Shop and at other similar gun shops. But this time we did something different.

  When Papito was killed, it was Lent—the season that begins forty days before Easter and when Christians around the world spend a lot of time contemplating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So on that Friday before Easter, what we Christians often call Good Friday, rather than having a church service in a sanctuary, we took things into the streets. We had our Good Friday service outside the Shooter Shop.

  Good Friday service at the Shooter Shop [Jamie Moffett]

  The young men in our neighborhood, many of whom have seen their friends wounded or killed on these streets, carried a large wooden cross to the front of the gun shop. We listened to the familiar passage from the Gospels recounting Jesus’s violent murder on the cross on that first Good Friday. We heard the Gospel writers speak of how the women wept at the foot of the cross. And then, after the Gospel reading, we invited the victims of gun violence to share their stories. We listened to mothers, with tears rolling down their faces, share about losing their kids.

  Something profound happened that Good Friday. The tears of those women two thousand years ago met the tears of these women standing among us. Calvary met Kensington. The suffering of Jesus met the suffering of our streets.

  After the service, a woman came up to me, deeply stirred. “I get it. I get it!” she said. “I understand something today.” I held her as she went on
, tears streaming. “God understands my pain, because God knows what it feels like to lose your son.”

  I realized in that moment that this woman was Papito’s mom. And she had encountered the gospel. The good news is that we have a God who understands our pain, who knows what it feels like to lose a son.

  This gun crisis is not just an “issue.” Its casualties have names, faces, and tears. And this is also a deeply spiritual matter. It is about a God who suffers with those who suffer, who grieves with those who grieve, and who promises that the tomb is empty and death will lose its sting. This is a redemption story. It is about a God who redeems Cain, Tubal-Cain, the young man who killed Papito, the person who sold him the gun, Mel “the Dragon Man” Bernstein, and even you and me.

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  Gun History 101

  We certainly are in a hell of a business. . . . A fellow has to wish for trouble so as to make a living, the only consolation being, however, if we don’t get the business, someone else will. . . . It would be a terrible state of affairs if my conscience started to bother me now.

  —Frank Jonas, Remington dealer

  ONE OF THE FIRST GAMES I (Shane) can remember playing as a kid was cowboys and Indians. The cowboys had cap guns that popped and smoked and smelled like gunpowder. The “Indians” had tomahawks and feather headdresses. Looking back, I’m embarrassed.

  One of my favorite places to go as a kid growing up in Tennessee was Silver Dollar City, before Dolly Parton bought it out and renamed it Dollywood. It took the Wild West theme over the top. Granted, there weren’t tons of entertainment options in East Tennessee at the time; nonetheless, Silver Dollar City was a blast. It was built to resemble an old Western town, with live metalcrafting workshops, candle-making shops, and folks riding around on horseback. And my favorite—the saloon. We used to go in the saloon and watch the ladies dance, which undoubtedly was toned down for the underage audience (I was eight). At the end of the show, the women, with their puffy dresses and big hair, would come into the audience and plant big kisses on the kids, leaving giant red lips on us. There were gunfights and people playing banjos and bluegrass in the street. I was convinced this was exactly how life used to be in the old days.

  But the best part was the train. There was an old-timey coal-powered train that you could ride through the mountains. It would huff and puff, and the steam engine would scream out with blast after blast. Midway through the ride, there was an announcement that we were experiencing a problem. You’d see some alarmed faces, especially among the kids. Then out of nowhere we heard guns popping, and masked bandits on horseback would take over the train. It used to scare me to death. Then, just in the nick of time, the good guys would come—also on horseback and also with guns, of course—and they would save the day. Was I glad for those good guys with guns!

  The Wild West also took over my living room growing up, as Bonanza, my grandpa’s favorite show, blared from the television.

  Heck, I’m even named after a cowboy. Legend has it, my parents were having a hard time landing on a name and eventually found inspiration from the old Western Shane. Almost providential.

  The Wild West seemed to follow me even after I left East Tennessee. When I lived in India as a college student, all the kids asked me if I was a cowboy. That’s how pervasive the Wild West imagery is. They thought everyone from the US was a cowboy, especially if they had a Southern accent. I told the kids in India that, while I wasn’t a cowboy, I was named after one. That’s the best I could do.

  The Wild West has shaped our imaginations—and our facts.

  The Myth of the Wild West

  History tells a different story than the popular folklore of the Wild West. Pamela Haag and other historians have gone to great lengths to separate truth from fiction in the tales of the great American heroes and villains, the outlaws and gunslingers of old.1

  In the late 1800s, dime novels became a massively profitable business, and the Wild West was where they hit gold. They were sensational, mass-produced fantasy books, and most of them were about the Wild West. One of the authors told an interviewer in 1902 that you needed three things to write a bestseller: “a riotous imagination, a dramatic instinct, and a right hand that never tires.”2 The novels all had a similar plotline, which later shaped radio Westerns and the television Westerns that my grandpa watched. The good guys win. The bad guys get caught or die. One author of the novels said you had to “kill someone in almost every paragraph.” In the words of Pamela Haag, figures like Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, and Calamity Jane became American legends and went “from lowbrow fiction to highbrow historical fact.”3 Truth was the first casualty of our romanticism with guns.

  The dime novels eventually turned into TV shows and movies (and more books). At least 1,400 Western films came out from 1935 to 1960. They were pretty much all you could watch. Eight of the top ten television shows in 1959 were Westerns. It’s clear that far more folks died in the movies than on the real frontier.4

  Wild West legends moved “from lowbrow fiction to highbrow historical fact”

  Publishers sold thirty-five million paperback Westerns per year in the 1950s. There were magazines too—Gunslingers of the West, True Frontier, Outlaws of the Old West, Badmen of the Old West, and Best of the West. By 1969 the word cowboy was everywhere. One scholar compiled a bibliography of Western gunman works and came up with a grand total of 2,491—by 1969!5 As Haag says, “The myth flourishes in the space between what happened and what we wish had happened.”6 She says the gun was “retroactively fetishized.”7 It may not be the history that was, but it is the history that we wish it were. Even now, many older folks are nostalgic about a past that never actually existed.

  Spoiler alert: the cowboys of old are not like they were in Bonanza or The Magnificent Seven. Both the lethality and the moral righteousness of the cowboys are exaggerated. Historians say cowboys were lower-class bachelors who were laborers and usually lived a disreputable life ravaged by alcoholism and vagrancy. Historian Wallace Stegner shows the cowboy not as an iconic hero but as an “overworked, underpaid hireling, almost as homeless and dispossessed as a modern crop worker.”8 David Cartwright, another historian of the West, says we have had to do “moral surgery”9 to transform the historical cowboy into the mythical icon of rugged individualism and superhero-like qualities. Most often cowboys were not saving the day but sleeping off a night of drinking and womanizing.

  The violence that we have glorified in the cowboy legends may not have existed as we wish it had, but today that almost doesn’t matter. It has become common understanding despite the facts. Even in the 1800s, most murders were also, just as they are now, among people intimately involved—domestic violence—and guns were not always the means of choice.10 Historians point out that poisoning (with things like arsenic), stabbing, and simply beating someone to death were more common.11 It wasn’t cowboy renegades killing outlaws but abusive husbands killing their wives. I know we love our Wild West stories, and I hate to burst the bubble, but we exaggerated the violence and the moral righteousness of the heroes. In the words of one historian, “The body count of gun casualties on the frontier at Saturday matinees far exceeded the number of casualties on the actual frontier.”12 Sorry, John Wayne.

  Many of us learned in history class that the gun saved the Wild West from Natives and outlaws. The truth is, our mythology about the West may have helped save the gun.

  So Where Did We Get All These Guns?

  In 2018 the NRA showcased a gun that is disguised as a cell phone. (What could go wrong?) We’ve got big guns and little guns. Guns that are disguised as lipstick. Six-bullet revolvers that can be worn as rings. There are Hello Kitty guns designed for kids and pink guns made for women. There are guns that can shoot one hundred rounds per minute. There are even 3-D printed guns. We have a hard time wrapping our minds around 3-D printing in general, but even more with the implications of being able to print your own gun made from the same material as a LEGO piece. But where did all
these guns come from?

  Guns are older than America. Humans have been making guns, cannons, and weapons that use gunpowder since around AD 1000. The word gun is first recorded in referring to a personal, handheld firearm around the end of the 1300s. But what is new, and uniquely American, is the gun market. We are the ones who mastered the art of mass-producing and selling guns, both domestically and around the world.

  The gun business started as the war business. Unsurprisingly, Uncle Sam was the sugar daddy of the gun industry. But, as we shall see, the government turned out to be a tricky business partner, and the war economy proved to be economically unsustainable during peacetime. Peace was bad for business.

  The inventor Eli Whitney played a big role in the history of guns in America, especially when it came to the transition from gun as craft to gun as commodity. Whitney invented the cotton gin, but perhaps his more lasting contribution to the world (for better or worse) is the idea of interchangeable parts for mass manufacturing. This is where he became a major player in the history of guns in America.

  Whitney’s cotton gin transformed the economy of the antebellum South, massively boosting the economy of slavery. But despite the booming slave economy, Whitney went broke. Turns out he was a better inventor than he was a businessman.

  For Whitney, guns were sort of his Hail Mary to survive financially. With bankruptcy looming, the opportunity to make guns for the government surfaced, and he jumped on it.

  In 1798 the US government issued twenty-seven contracts for a total of 30,200 guns.13 Eli Whitney signed up to make ten thousand of those all by himself! And get this: he had never made a gun before. But he turned out to be good at making the machines that made the guns. The problem was cost and the time it would take. It took him years and thousands of dollars to make the first gun. Because he was pioneering mass production, he knew that making the first gun would be harder than making the next ten thousand guns—it would be easier once he had the process and technology in place. There were many skeptics and doubters, but he delivered on those ten thousand guns. It wasn’t long before businessmen capitalized on his ideas.