Do we want to live in a world where people get shot for texting?

It made me really sad and a little bit frightened to read about the latest gun tragedy: a man getting shot and killed in Florida for texting his three year old daughter during the previews of a movie. I’ve definitely had my phone out during the previews of movies before, but I always put it away before the movie. I know I would get angry responses and it’s not going to change anyone’s mind to talk about whether people should be allowed to carry guns into movie theaters and whether you should be able to cite the “stand your ground” law as a justification for killing somebody because you “felt threatened.” If that were applied consistently, no gang violence could ever be prosecuted. But let’s talk about this in terms of sin, because hopefully we can agree that sin happened in the theater regardless of our views about gun regulations.

We are deceived when we think that sin involves making clear, rational decisions to do evil. It is almost always a lack of intentionality in how we live rather than doing something intentional. It tends to happen in the heat of the moment when our passions are raging. It is usually enabled by a series of choices that have been made leading up to that moment which didn’t seem all that decisive in themselves but created a dangerous window of opportunity for Satan. If you have an extramarital affair, then the sin starts a lot earlier in the sequence of bad choices than when you find yourselves in bed together. The same thing is true when you shoot somebody in the heat of an ugly argument.

I know it will make some people mad for me to say this, but white-on-white crime gets a completely different response than black-on-black crime or brown-on-brown crime. I’ve shared before how a Latino kid in my former youth group bought a gun off the black market because he was getting shot at by a rival gang, and the gun ended up being used accidentally to kill his little sister. “Gangbanger” kids don’t get to play the self-defense card when they shoot somebody even if they had a reasonable fear of getting shot by the other person. Because they’re the “bad guys.” According to the way that we categorize society into good guys and bad guys, Curtis Reeves, the Florida theater shooter, was the epitome of a good guy as a white, retired police officer.

So that’s the first level of sin. Dividing the world into good guys and bad guys and creating a fear of bad guys that puts the good guys on edge. This sin is the sin of dehumanizing the other and not recognizing God’s image in them. When a group of people doesn’t respect the humanity of another group of people, whether it’s due to their race, fashion, economic status, or something else, then we live in a world that is that much more predisposed to violence. When we divide the world into good guys and bad guys instead of recognizing that all of us are bad guys whom God can rescue and use for good, then we’ve created a tinderbox for more sin to flare up.

Why did Curtis Reeves carry a gun into the theater? Because it was his duty as a good guy with a gun to be ready to take out any bad guy with a gun who tried to go on a rampage. If I am carrying around something capable of killing other people, I am making the assumption that I will not lose my cool and do something tragic when the reason I’m carrying it is because I also assume that other people with guns can’t control themselves. The sin here is spiritual pride. Other people may abuse guns, but I only use them responsibly. I’ve written before about the doctrine of the total depravity of everyone else. This is a perfect illustration of it.

Chad Oulson, the victim of the shooting, and Curtis Reeves both participated in the sin that resulted in the ultimate tragedy. They got into a heated argument that spiraled out of control that either one of them could have backed away from. Neither of them could let it go. All of us have been Chad Oulson and Curtis Reeves at one point or another. Last night, I got into an argument with my wife in which I was so intoxicated by my self-righteousness that I said hurtful things that could have been communicated much differently.

I don’t own a gun. I’ve talked at times about getting one, but my wife won’t let me. One thing I read that was very sobering to me is that many of the deaths from gun violence in our country don’t show up in the usual statistics because they’re suicides. I think I’ve shared before that I attempted suicide once in 1998. If I’d had a gun instead of a bottle of pills, I wouldn’t be here. I’m in a different place psychologically now than I was then, but I still tremble at the temptations that would come with such a powerful weapon.

It seems about as morally responsible to carry a gun into a movie theater as going to visit the home of a woman you’ve been flirting with at work who isn’t your wife when she’s there all alone. People who know that they’re sinners know that “sin is [always] lurking at the door” as God says to Cain in Genesis 4:7. I imagine that Curtis Reeves is probably a nice, generous person who did heroic things when he was a cop and mentored many other police officers. I’ve also known and loved some of the “gangbanger” kids whom people expect to see on the nightly news for doing bad things, and I know that they are beautiful sinners also. We need to recognize that there is no such thing as good guys and bad guys, only sinners in a variety of places in our journey of being healed by God’s grace.