Professor Bob Burns wrote in several weeks ago to criticize Sen. John Thune’s assertion that defunding the police had contributed significantly to the rise in gun violence on the streets of America (Register, 7-30-21). Burns chose to blame guns, or “weapons of war,” as he describes them, in the hands of the criminal and mentally unstable elements of society for the rising gun violence in many of our major cities, rather than reduced police funding and manpower in those cities.
If defunding law enforcement agencies hasn’t been directly related to surging drug and violent crime rates, then why have cities like Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland, Minneapolis and New York moved to restore millions of dollars in funding previously cut from their police departments? (WSJ 5-26-21).
Burns also did not properly define the “weapons of war” – which he wishes to ban. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), handguns accounted for 6,368 out of the 10,258 homicides by firearm (62%) in 2019. For the years 2015-18, handguns were used in 64-67% of firearm homicides in the U.S. Is Burns advocating for the banning of handguns in America? Does he believe that such a ban would prevent criminals from obtaining handguns and continuing to use them against unprotected citizens in under-policed cities?
How far would Burns go in limiting gun ownership by law-abiding Americans for self-protection needs?
There is also a larger perspective to consider in all of this.
John Lott (UCLA - BA, MA, PhD), one of America’s leading gun rights advocates and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, analyzed the mass shooting events in America during the period 1998-2018. His research revealed that “of the 69 killers committing 66 mass public shootings in the United States,” an astounding 84% of these mass murderers were atheist or agnostic (with 16% expressing some form of “current, significant religious worldview/belief structure”).
America’s growing obsession with simplistic, humanist-minded solutions to the social problems plaguing our nation ignores the deep-rooted source of those problems – the moral vacuum created by the banishment of God and his word from the public institutions across our land – and the shocking indifference which has emerged toward the Gospel of Christ across America.
Daniel Webster (1782-1852), one of the most influential founding fathers from the early years of our Republic, spoke these words of truth regarding those dangers. “If the power of the Gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.”
