A while back, while visiting a congregation in a community with multiple victims of a mass shooting, Atwood raised the question of how churches can get involved. “We shouldn’t be talking about that here,” one man responded hotly. “That’s a political issue, and it’s not appropriate for the church.”
That question – exactly how the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) should respond to the gun violence that claims 30,000 lives a year in the United States – will be put directly to the 219th General Assembly when it meets in Minneapolis in July. The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) is asking the assembly to consider a 20-page report from a study group that “challenges our society’s fatalism and numbness in accepting the highest gun death rates in the world.”
The report does not directly take a position on gun control, although the denomination has done so previously. In 1998, for example, the General Assembly called on Presbyterians to “intentionally work toward removing handguns and assault weapons from our homes and our communities.”
But this report attempts to present gun violence as a moral issue, and to call Presbyterians to action.
The ACSWP report, “Violence and Gospel Values: Mobilizing in Response to God’s Call,” asks Presbyterian to do what the man with whom Atwood spoke was unwilling to do: to speak out and get involved.
One of its recommendations “encourages the church at every level — from individual member to congregation, presbytery, synod, and national church — to become informed and active in preventing gun violence” and to provide pastoral care for victims of gun violence.
It calls on Presbyterian congregations to hold prayer vigils at places where gun violence has claimed lives, and to “if necessary, take non-violent action against gun shops and gun shows … known to sell guns that end up in crime.”
The report also encourages pastors to speak about guns from the pulpit — calling for “periodic preaching on gun violence” and “prayers for the victims and perpetrators of gun violence, and confession of our own complicity” in allowing such violence to continue.
And the report urges Presbyterians to support positions involving gun ownership that previous General Assemblies have approved. That would include limiting the acquisition of handguns for personal use to one per month, and requiring waiting periods with background checks and “cooling off periods” for all guns sold.
It is expected this report will generate some heat at the assembly, as Americans’ opinions on gun control and gun ownership clearly are divided.
National polls have indicated fairly consistently through the years that a majority of Americans oppose a ban on handgun sales — for example, 59 percent in an April 2008 survey of just over 1,500 American adults, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans (73 percent), six out of ten independents (59 percent) and just over half of Democrats opposed a handgun ban.
However, polls also show that a majority (58 percent) say it’s more important to control gun ownership than to protect the rights of people to own guns (37 percent).
A Gallup Poll from October 2009 found about even numbers thought laws involving the sale of firearms should be made more strict (44 percent of just over 1,000 American adults surveyed), compared to those who thought the laws should be kept as they are now (43 percent). Tracking the results of such polls over time, “the trends on the questions about gun-sale laws and a handgun-possession ban indicate that Americans’ attitudes have moved to being more pro-gun rights,” the report concludes.
Ronald Kernaghan, (ACSWP’s co-chair, told the General Assembly Mission Council in February to expect some fuss about the gun violence report at the General Assembly, as the committee has already received some push-back.
“Let me be clear about what this report does not do,” said Kernaghan, who is director of Presbyterian Ministries and an assistant professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. “We are not advocating constitutional change. We are not attempting to ban handguns. We do not seek to limit ownership, except for people who have been judged by society to be a danger,” such as convicted felons and spouse abusers.
“What the report tries to do is this: shine a spotlight on dealers who sell large quantities of arms to straw customers,” by selling to someone with a clean record who then passes the weapons on to someone else, “and they enter the underground that way.”
Kernaghan said “we clearly support responsible gun ownership,” but with more than 33,000 deaths each year in the U.S. because of guns — about half of those are suicides — the church has an obligation to speak.
Atwood, a retired pastor from Virginia and a former mission co-worker in Japan, served on the task force. A hunter and gun-owner, he also has worked for 36 years to bring attention to the problem of gun violence, including writing overtures to previous General Assemblies.
The report points out that the governing bodies of mainline denominations have for years made statements about gun violence and the proliferation of weapons in the United States. “But it’s always easier to support a statement at General Assembly than it is to take back an issue to the local church,” Atwood said.
“Yet after these thirty years we see the same patterns continuing unabated: a culture which accommodates and even cultivates violence and fear, the proliferation of assault weapons which go beyond the legitimate needs of hunters and gun collectors, the alarming number of preventable gun-related deaths of victims of homicide, suicide, and accident, the increasing incidence of child-related gun violence.”
The study asks Presbyterians to consider gun violence not as a political issue, but a spiritual one, Atwood said.
“Guns are not discriminatory at all,” he said. “They kill Republicans, Democrats, independents, black and white, young and old. Since when did a death of a human being made in the image of God become a political issue?
