Please, no guns for Christmas!

Rep. Thomas Masse of Kentucky recently drew a volley of criticism when he posted a family Christmas photo on Twitter. Gathered before their Christmas Tree, Masse, his wife and children beam for the camera, each cradling an assault weapon. Below the photo are the words: "Merry Christmas!, P.S. Santa, please bring ammo."

So insensitive, one viewer wrote, coming so soon after a disturbed 15-year-old boy with a semi-automatic pistol murdered four classmates and wounded seven others. As if the problem is all in the timing. Perhaps if Masse had waited another week or two, when the horror of yet another school mass shooting had subsided, it wouldn’t bother us so much.

Lest we be tempted to see Rep. Masse’s posting as some kind of joke, we should remember that the Republican is a leader of a pro-gun caucus in Congress and a fierce opponent of any efforts to regulate firearms. He has introduced legislation to repeal, among other things, the Gun-Free School Zone Act. Because he claims guns make us safer, he wants guns in schools, churches, and on the streets.

To see his family gleefully sporting military-grade weapons makes me wonder, safe from what and whom? Home invaders, muggers, Government agents intent on snatching guns from their hands, refugees at the border?

I also wonder, is this a religious family? In a 2018 interview in the United Methodist magazine Church and Society, Masse, who was running for re-election, was asked about his values as a Christian.

“Well, as a Christian, I always come back to the Golden Rule – to treat others as you would want to be treated. I learned that in Sunday School.”

Masse is not alone among Christians who claim allegiance to Jesus while arming themselves to the teeth. Four of ten white evangelicals own guns, and many see gun rights as a sacred right. As Shane Claiborne, an anti-gun activist recently said, “The same people who worship the Prince of Peace are packing heat.”

The guns-make-us-safe argument was behind presidential candidate Ben Carson's 2015 claim that if Germans had been allowed to own guns in pre-war Germany, the Holocaust would never have happened. But as scholars have pointed out, in 1938 the Nazis actually loosened gun restrictions imposed a decade before, but not for Jews and others considered enemies of the state.

After Kristallnacht, when mobs attacked Jews and destroyed synagogues, authorities began confiscating anything considered dangerous from Jewish homes, including swords Jewish army veterans kept from World War I. The theory that Jews, less than one percent of the German population, could have withstood the genocidal violence of the Nazis if only they had guns is absurd.

But won’t we be safer in our homes today if we have guns? No says David Hemenway, professor at Harvard School of Public Health. Hemenway polled 150 scientists who study the impact of firearms on society. The overwhelming majority found that firearms make society more dangerous.

Even if we disregard—and who can?—the horrors of mass shootings, the prevalence of guns, both in the home and in public places, can be linked to increased suffering and deaths. Although gun ownership may not directly make the crime rate go up, as Hemenway writes: “What guns do is make hostile interactions—robberies, assaults—much more deadly.”

Access to firearms also contributes to the high rate of suicides. According to Madeline Drexler, Harvard Public Health editor, many more people kill themselves with a gun than are murdered with one.

It’s also true that there is a higher chance that guns kept in your home for protection will be used against you or a family member. Parents should assume their children know where guns are kept, advises Hemenway. He points to a study in which a third of boys whose parents claimed did not know about their guns had already found and played with the weapons.

The sad truth is that deaths by gun violence continue to rise in America, up an astounding 15 percent from 2019 to 2020, to a total of over 45,000.

Is accepting the truth about guns so hard? I wonder as I look at the faces behind the weapons in Masse’s Christmas photo. May you never know the heartbreak of losing a child, parent, spouse, sibling or friend to gun violence. May you sooner rather than later, I pray, come to understand the simple truth—that guns will not save us.

© Ben Jacques