Reader Madeline DuBois Foley writes:

“We don’t have a nuclear weapons problem, we have a sin problem. The problem is the culture in places like Iran and North Korea and the human heart. People aren’t going to change, whether or not we regulate nuclear weapons. If they didn’t have nuclear weapons, they would just use guns and tanks to kill us. Therefore, we ought to let them have nuclear weapons.”

“We don’t have a drunk driving problem, we have a sin problem. The human heart will never change. Even if we regulate it and make laws against it, people will still drunk drive. Regardless, there’s no constitutional argument to be made for limiting people’s ability to drive a vehicle while drunk. Therefore, we should not limit drunk driving.”

Do you see how silly this sounds?

The premise of this line of arguing when it comes to gun control seems to be that laws just don’t work. And sure, sometimes they don’t, but if you refuse to legislate laws about things that ought to change, then they will never change. Laws aren’t the end-all of the culture, but they are an important facet of it. If there is in fact a sin problem, and a legal mechanism/institution that makes it a hell of a lot easier to sin exists, then we ought to try our hardest to eliminate this mechanism. The goal of a good society is to make it easier for people to be good and harder for people to be evil. Why is it that with all other issues, people are open to the idea of regulating institutions that are inadvertently or intentionally causing harm, but with gun control, there is a sense of throwing up hands and saying “We can’t do anything! Laws don’t work!” Well, you asked for laws about all the other things that help to cause death and evil in this country and in the world. Why not this one?

Pope Francis describes the relationship between prayer and action when he says, “You pray for the hungry, then you feed them.”

Jesus describes the blasphemous misuse of prayer this way:

Why do you call me “Lord, Lord” and not do what I tell you? (Luke 6:46).

One of the things he tells us is the fifth commandment, but to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. When you offer “thoughts and prayers” for the latest in our eternal gun slaughter spectacle, while laboring to make sure that absolutely nothing changes in our gun regime, you are laboring to make sure that there will be another 35,000 violations of the fifth commandment next year.  Jesus tells us solemnly that if we do that we shall hear from him on That Day the terrible words, “Depart from me.  I never knew you.”

There is a simple way to avoid this terrible destiny: stop refusing to do what he tells you.  That means, among other things, stop telling the lies Ms. Foley sketches.  Stop working to maintain the status quo.  Stop, in a word, using prayer as a weapon against action and start making it the preface to actoin.

So don’t, for instance, offer “thoughts and prayers” and say “this is a mental health issue, not a gun issue” all while destroying background checks on mental health in your spite at the Legacy of the Black Guy.

I know, I know. The slew of excuses is waiting to burst out.  Save it.  Here is one simple little suggestion.  Nothing big.  Just a tiny little idea that has been sitting there for years.  It doesn’t even rise to the level of a policy suggestion for limiting something so bloody obvious as the availability or manufacture of AR-15s (even though.. ahem):

No.  All I suggest–demand, actually–is that the NRA-occupied Congress stop it’s 21-year war on information and knowledge about out gun violence plague and authorize the CDC to do the study that these lackeys of arms industry human sacrifice have forbidden since 1996.

“In the area of what works to prevent shootings, we know almost nothing,” Mark Rosenberg, who, in the mid-1990s, led the CDC’s gun-violence research efforts, said shortly after the San Bernardino shooting in 2015.

In 1996, the Republican-majority Congress threatened to strip funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unless it stopped funding research into firearm injuries and deaths. The National Rifle Association accused the CDC of promoting gun control. As a result, the CDC stopped funding gun-control research — which had a chilling effect far beyond the agency, drying up money for almost all public health studies of the issue nationwide.

If you are a sane person, you will no doubt say that it is crazy to forbid so much as researching the problem of gun violence in the hope of saving lives.  But if you are a member of the Gun Cult, you will demand that we remain in total ignorance and do nothing because the only thing that matters to you is arms industry profits no matter how many people have to die.

I know, I know.  “You paint with a broad brush”.  That’s a lie.  I paint with a very narrow brush.  If you response to the slaughter of 35,000 people each year is “Do absolutely nothing to change our current approach” you are a member of the Gun Cult.  Because our current approach absolutely guarantees those 35,000 deaths.  Absolutely.  Guarantees. It.  And if you are so closed to change that you refuse to even study the problem, as our wholly-owned Congressional subsidiary of the NRA does, your “thoughts and prayers” for the victims you create are an abomination and a stench in the nostrils of God.