So when Laurie thought about counseling the day she lost her sisters, she was right. She did need a lot of it for herself, which she speaks of in a TEDx talk she delivered in Jackson, Wyoming.17 But it also set her on a journey to completing her master’s degree in counseling from the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. She has developed a trauma-informed yoga class and has led several victim support groups for other shooting and trauma survivors.
Laurie has written a letter to Congress urging commonsense gun reform. She’s also written blog posts offering advice after mass shootings, both for victims and for their communities. She sheds light on how the media takes advantage of tragedy and abandons one when the next one happens. One of her core messages is to be present. Be with each other.
Sharletta Evans
It was the winter of 1995, just before Christmas. Sharletta Evans had her two sons with her as she drove to a relative’s house to pick up a grandniece after a drive-by shooting in their neighborhood the previous night. She left the kids in the car with her twenty-one-year-old cousin and seventeen-year-old niece and went inside to pick up her grandniece. While she was inside, the shooters came back. Bullets rained down on the car and the house. After the shooters left, Sharletta went back out to the car to find that the bullets missed her six-year-old son, Calvin, but one hit her three-year-old son, Casson, in the head.
Sharletta held her son and walked on the sidewalk. She talked to him. “You can make it. Hold on big guy.” Her dress was covered in blood from her collar to the hem. As the ambulance arrived, Casson took his last breath in his mom’s arms. Attempts to revive him at the hospital were unsuccessful.
What happened next Sharletta can only describe as an act of God. She heard a voice asking her if she would forgive the people who did this. By the power of the Spirit, Sharletta said she forgave them.
Casson Evans, killed in a drive-by shooting in December 1995
Seventeen years later she would be the first person to participate in a pilot program with the Colorado Department of Justice, the High Risk/Impact Victim Offender Dialogue. The victim-based restorative-justice program makes it possible for victims to meet with their offenders. There’s a long process of counseling on both sides that prepares the victim and the offender to explore every possible outcome from such a unique and weighted conversation.
Raymond Johnson was one of three teenagers in the drive-by car, and it was determined that he was the one who fired the bullet that killed Casson. At the time in Colorado, juveniles could be sentenced to life without an opportunity for parole, as Johnson was.
As reporters explained about the program, “Beyond a sheer willingness to participate in restorative justice, the offender has to meet a three-part test for acceptance based on demonstrating accountability, genuine remorse and willingness to repair harm. Johnson met all the criteria, though on the last count the only reparations he could offer were honest answers to a mother’s unanswered questions.”18
“There were so many questions,” Sharletta said. “When it came to every emotion, [my facilitator would] ask me where was I at. What did I want to say to him? I really had to dissect every emotion so there were no surprises.”
Memorial to the Lost
COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL, LITTLETON, COLORADO (APRIL 20, 1999)
Using two sawed-off shotguns, a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic handgun, and a 9mm semiautomatic carbine rifle, two students took the lives of twelve other students and a teacher on April 20, 1999. The shooting influenced many subsequent shootings. Here are the names of the lives lost that day:
Cassie Bernall, 17 William David Sanders, 47
Steven Curnow, 14 Rachel Scott, 17
Corey DePooter, 17 Isaiah Shoels, 18
Kelly Fleming, 16 John Tomlin, 16
Matthew Kechter, 16 Lauren Townsend, 18
Daniel Mauser, 15 Kyle Velasquez, 16
Daniel Rohrbough, 15
After each of them had prepared for their meeting, Sharletta and Raymond spent time asking each other questions and recalling that night seventeen years prior. Since their meeting, the Colorado Supreme Court struck down life sentences without parole for juveniles, and Sharletta has actively testified for Raymond to get a new sentence with an opportunity for parole. Sharletta actively advocates for victim-offender dialogue and juvenile sentencing reform. She has testified numerous times for restoration.
In 2009, three years prior to their meeting, Raymond sent Sharletta a Mother’s Day card and asked if she would be his mother. She didn’t answer until their meeting. It was hard for her to consider. Their meeting lasted eight hours. At the end, she held his hands and prayed over him. She also brought the card he sent and told him, “Yes, I will be your mother.”
In 2016 Sharletta was able to meet with the driver of the car through restorative justice.
Sharletta’s story of forgiveness and extensive work to offer the opportunity for restitution and restoration for offenders is awe-inspiring. It’s an example of what it looks like to no longer learn how to make war. It’s what we’re called to do when we choose to carry a plow instead of a gun. We have to recognize the trauma in our community and support the people like Sharletta who are working so hard, telling us to see the face of God in others.19
It’s Time
Beyoncé is onto something with her call for women to get in formation and “run the world.” Oprah announced at the Golden Globes last year to men who abuse and sexually assault women: “Your time is up.” The movement to end gun violence is largely led by women—like Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action and Lucy McBath (mother of gunshot victim Jordan Davis). Some of the largest marches in US history are happening right now and are led by women—the Women’s March is a movement shaping US history. Women are calling for an end to violence in all its ugly forms. The #MeToo campaign has been sweeping our country, calling for an end to the violence of sexual assault. All of this is an expression of women who are calling out and taking on the toxic masculinity that is destroying so many lives. And gun violence is one aspect of it. We have a bit of a woman-power revolution happening—and it’s about time. If Sarah Winchester were alive today, instead of being locked away in the loneliness of her mansion perhaps she would be marching in the streets with the women who are saying, “Your time is up.”
One can hope.
ten
The Second Amendment and the Sermon on the Mount
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty.
—James Madison
FOR SOME FOLKS, the Second Amendment is as holy as the Great Commandment. So it warrants a closer look. But it is important to note from the outset that for those of us who consider ourselves Christians, the final authority for life is not the Constitution. It is the Bible, and it is Jesus. We believe that the Bible is divinely inspired in a unique way that the Constitution and other human documents, as important as they may be, are not. David Anderson often says, “We are better at protecting the Amendments than the Commandments,”1 one of which is “Thou shalt not kill.”
For many of our international readers, this chapter will be particularly disturbing, since your governments most likely do not guarantee the right to bear arms as a human right. And yet even for the most patriotic US citizens among us, there are unmistakable complications with reading the Second Amendment as a blank check for gun ownership with no limitations or regulations, something that even the folks who wrote the amendment did not permit. During a video call with youth in Afghanistan, we noticed that, with their questions, they were trying to comprehend why our laws needed the Second Amendment at all. After all, war is a constant presence in their lives, and so why would a country lawfully introduce it into its neighborhoods and defend it in its courts?
Second Amendment author James Madison wrote these words: “Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. The former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.”2
One person’s freedom can b
ecome another person’s oppression. One person’s right to bear arms can infringe on another person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When the Constitution was written, freedom for white men included the right to own slaves, but we eventually came to see that if all people are created equal, then no one can own another person as property or be counted as three-fifths human.
One person’s right to drink alcohol can impose on another person’s safety on roads, and so the invention of cars led to new regulations that horses and buggies did not have. And as technology evolved, with cars able to go over one hundred miles per hour, so did the laws that govern them. When smoking tobacco was proved to be detrimental to public health, we adopted rules about where people can and can’t smoke. Fireworks are seen to be a safety hazard, are illegal in many places, and have limits on how powerful they can be even in the places where they are legal. And when it comes to owning guns, it is quite apparent that one person’s right to bear arms can encroach on another person’s right to live. Sometimes the problem is not just the abuse of power but the abuse of liberty.
We have been better at protecting guns than protecting people. Is one person’s desire to own a military-style assault rifle that can shoot one hundred rounds per minute so important that we will continue to allow hundreds of lives to be lost in mass shootings where these are the weapon of choice?
“A Well Regulated Militia”
These are the words of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It is interesting that it begins with the words “well regulated.” That seems to be the last thing some gun owners want, but it is right there in the Constitution.
Rather than a “well regulated Militia,” one might even suggest a rewrite to the Second Amendment to more accurately describe what we have today in the US: “A poorly regulated mass of armed individuals.”
It is striking that the NRA posted only half of the Second Amendment at their headquarters in Sacramento, California. It reads: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” They left out that half about “well regulated” and “militia.”
One might guess there would be fifty militias in the United States, one per state, and that they would be well regulated. But one would be wrong. The lines between militias and armed hate groups like those that marched on Charlottesville and that took over the wildlife refuge in Oregon get blurred. The Southern Poverty Law Center listed more than five hundred armed militias and hate groups in 2010, and the number of armed militias grew as much as 245 percent in one year (2009).3 Some of our worst domestic terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, have been linked to militia groups.
It’s clear that what the authors of the Constitution had in mind by “militia” is radically different from the gun-toting extremist fringe groups that exist today, such as the Bundy gang, who took over the federal land in Oregon, or the white supremacists who marched in camo in Charlottesville.
What the militias have evolved into over the past two hundred years is a uniquely American phenomenon. They often pride themselves on being “patriots,” but the irony cannot be missed. These militia groups are often made up of individuals who are compelled by conspiracy theories and deep distrust of the government. To be fair, we believe that a certain amount of distrust of power is a good thing, perhaps even patriotic. But the irony is that these highly armed people who are often draped in American flags and call themselves patriots are prepared to go to war with our own military and, if necessary, to kill hundreds of our own military service members. They are the 3 percent of gun owners who own half of the three hundred million guns in America. They are the ones who send death threats and march in the streets in full camo while holding semiautomatics. They are the folks who think it makes sense to arm four-year-olds. They are not the majority of gun owners, but they are a forceful, intimidating minority. Some of them are terribly violent, aggressive, and racist, such as the folks who showed up in Charlottesville with torches.
We don’t want to paint them all with the same brush. Some militia groups are white supremacists, like those who threatened protesters in Ferguson and marched in the neo-Nazi rally at Charlottesville. But modern-day militias are not all filled with Timothy McVeighs. Some of them simply have a distrust of the government and have tried to stand alongside the oppressed in struggles like Standing Rock, where Native Americans blocked the oil pipeline. It is not uncommon for militias to protect vulnerable people from government and corporate forces that threaten to run over them, and they usually bring their guns and body armor.
They may have different stripes, but what is consistent is that they don’t trust the government and that they believe in arming themselves in case the need should arise to fight the government itself. Can you think of other industrialized countries where the people live in such constant suspicion of their government that they are actively preparing to use bullets instead of ballots to change things?
The backdrop for the Second Amendment was the armed citizenry of each state that existed before there was a large, stable federal military like the one we have today. They were sort of like state armies or state national guards, like the Kansas militia or the Michigan militia. It is important to note that one of the duties of the original state militias was to serve as slave patrols. States like Virginia wanted to make sure that the slave masters were able to shoot runaway slaves, squash slave revolts, and keep other slaves subservient. It may not have been the only purpose of the state militias, but it was certainly a major one. And now this amendment written at least in part to allow the armed oppression of slaves continues to keep us in chains.
The real dilemma with the Second Amendment was what to do once the “united states” had a unified army. What role do the militias have now? And do we really need fringe militia groups when there is a federal army, national guard, and armed police units in every municipality in the country?
The question became this: Does the Second Amendment guarantee the collective right to own guns, like in the case of the militias, which still need regulation, or is it an individual right not contingent on any affiliation to a group? That is the million-dollar question.
And the Supreme Court has ruled on this one. For two hundred years the courts interpreted “the right to bear arms” as a collective or state right, but in 2008 it became crystal clear (in District of Columbia v. Heller) that the right to bear arms is an individual right, and states cannot block it.
But what the court also made clear is that the Second Amendment is not unlimited. Here are the words of one of the most conservative justices, the late Antonin Scalia: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. . . . The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualification on the commercial sale of arms.”4 In short, individuals have a right to guns, but those rights are not unlimited. They are subject to rules, regulations, and restrictions. The jury may still be out on whether that is true in practice.
Most of our tension on guns comes from these two dueling rights, both guaranteed by the Constitution:
The right to keep and bear arms. And the right to live in communities free of violence, the assurance of “domestic tranquility.”
The 90 percent of Americans, including gun owners, who wanted to see change happen after Sandy Hook could probably figure this out, but here’s where things get dicey: there are a few gun extremists who have held the conversation—and the politicians—hostage. That’s 10 percent or less who believe in limitless guns with no restrictions, something that not even the writers of the Second Amendment believed in.
Guns were proliferating in the US at the precise time that the Dred Scott case declared that African Americans have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” which obviously included the right to guns. White folks loved gun control when it meant controlling black and brown and native people and preventing them from accessing guns.
Native Americans were quite wealthy compared to many rural white folks in the 1800s. Their success at trading fur and other valuables made it conceivable that they could out-arm white folks if there weren’t some regulation on sales.
Then, some African Americans began to embrace guns. As we saw earlier, guns had some celebrity endorsements from African Americans like journalist Ida B. Wells, who bought a pistol after witnessing a lynching and said, “The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.”5 With celebrity endorsements from black heroes like Wells, some black folks started to see the gun as an “equalizer,” and white folks got worried.
In the landmark 1876 case US v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court ruled that it did not have the power to control states, which effectively meant that the racist agenda of disarming African Americans would be permitted. The ruling, celebrated by the NRA, supported gun control to limit African Americans trying to access guns for their protection in states like Louisiana that didn’t want black folks to have guns.
Beating Guns Page 13