Abbot: “The problem is not guns. The problem is hearts without God.”

Leigh Jones titled a recently World Magazine article about the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, “Hearts without God.” Jones quotes Texas Governor Greg Abbot’s response to the shooting, but also editorializes, throwing dust on attempts to prevent such atrocities, whether through gun control or through identifying perpetrators in the planning stages.

These are the core paragraphs of Jones’ article:

“Every time there’s a shooting, everyone wants to talk about what the problem is,” [Texas Governor] Abbott said before Tuesday’s school safety roundtable meeting. “By now, we know what the problem is. The problem is innocent people are being shot. That must be stopped.”

But how to stop it remains agonizingly intractable. Pagourtzis used guns to kill two teachers and eight classmates, but he also brought homemade bombs. He snuck the weapons into the school, but he just as easily could have attacked his victims in the parking lot. People who want to kill others will find a way. His journals indicate he planned the attack for months, but he showed virtually no other signs of his murderous intent.

Nearly a week before the Santa Fe shooting, Abbott spoke at the National Rifle Association conference in Dallas. In what now seems like a prescient speech, he summed up the reason legislators can’t stop every killer every time, no matter how many laws they pass: “The problem is not guns. The problem is hearts without God.”

Let’s break this down, shall we?

In the first paragraph of the above section, Abbot states that “every time there’s a shooting, everyone wants to talk about what the problem is,” but that “By now, we know what the problem is. The problem is innocent people are being shot.” The logic here is so bad it is almost laughable. Abbot is constructing a strawman—when everyone “wants to talk about what the problem is” after a shooting, they know innocent people are being shot. What they want to know is how it could happen—and how it can be prevented.

Anyone who responds to the consternation and outrage that follows a school shooting with “we already know what the problem is, the problem is innocent people being shot” has their head in the sand. People know that is the problem. What they’re asking for are solutions. This is not the time for witty rejoinders.

In the second paragraph, Jones writes that “people who want to kill others will find a way.” Once again, there is a major failure in basic thought process. We work to limit nations’ access to nuclear weapons because we know that some weapons are more deadly than others. While it may be true that there will always be some people who act in violent ways, the tools they have at their disposal will have a significant impact on the number of people these individuals will be able to harm or kill.

Anyone who responds to school shootings with “people who want to kill others will find a way” should be asked to explain why such events tend to occur here, and not in other Western countries. One major difference between the U.S. and those countries is the availability of guns and ammunition. Countries which limit access to these deadly weapons—which are, after all, designed to do one thing and one thing only, to kill and to do so efficiently—see lower rates of school shootings, and lower rates of homicide overall.

Jones dismisses all of this, pointing instead to religion. Or, more specifically, to Christianity.

“The problem is not guns,” Jones quotes Abbot saying a week before the Santa Fe shooting. “The problem is hearts without God.” Abbot argues, in other words, that if every person had a heart turned to God—that if every person made Jesus and his will the center of their lives—such violence would end.

This claim is unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven. Every time someone points to a Christian who commits gun violence, Abbot can simply respond that that individual’s heart was clearly not right with God, because if it had been, they would not have done this act. For Abbot, religion is not about church membership. It is about the beliefs of the heart. And if one cannot both have a heart toward God and commit an act of gun violence, any individual who commits an atrocity will by definition not have a heart toward God.

It’s circular. It’s unfalsifiable. It’s unhelpful.

But let’s assume for a moment that it’s true (even though it’s not). Let’s assume that individuals who make religion the center of their lives—or Christianity specifically—do not commit acts of gun violence. Even were this true, stating that the problem is “hearts without God” is unhelpful because it is impossible to force or require a person to have a heart toward God.

You cannot mandate belief.

Indeed, evangelicals frequently draw attention to the number of young people who leave the faith, sometimes with a tone of near-panic—but if young people leave the faith in such numbers, if even being raised in a religions home does not ensure that an individual will be a person of faith, then religion does not present a realistic solution to the problem of school shootings.

In fact, a contention that school shootings are a result of “hearts without God” ought to make other preventative measures more urgent—because there will always be individuals with “hearts without God.” Indeed, Christian teachings hold that the number of the saved will be small, and Christian leaders portray Christians as a persecuted religious minority.

Why, then, does an unfalsifiable claim that the problem is lack of religious belief—when such belief cannot be mandated—so often forestall conversation about solutions?

Abbot is not the only one to focus on what goes on inside a person. One common response to school shootings is to ask what warning signs of possible psychological disturbance were missed. What was going on inside this person such that they were able to do this? We talk about the importance of having school counselors and other to work with students who are disturbed or at risk of violence.

But we rarely offer that as an only solution, and we rarely use the fact that there will always be disturbed students to justify opposition to other solutions.

Abbot—and Jones—shouldn’t either.

I have a Patreon! Please support my writing!