We Can't Get Rid of Guns Until We Get Rid Of Fear

But I am full of the wrath of the Lord, and I cannot hold it in.

"Pour it out on the children in the street and on the young men gathered together... From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace." – Jeremiah 6: 11,13-14

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. - 1 John 4:18

Now that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is the newest site of spontaneous human target practice, you will be told that the NRA and the gun lobby is standing between you and reasonable gun legislation; that the failure to enforce existing gun laws is the problem, or that the Second Amendment is out of date and out of touch. Don’t believe any of that. The force that is preventing sensible gun legislation and its enforcement is very simple and quite primal. That force is an overwhelming, inescapable, predominantly subconscious, but sometimes overtly conscious fear of violent uprising among black, brown, and/or poor white people.

I have no doubt that there were kids and teenagers that shot themselves or others in cold blood on the Frontier in acts of rage, jealousy, fear, drunkenness, or mental illness. However, I know of no history of any legislative attempts to limit any people’s access to any kind of firearm at all at that time (except of course laws that restricted access to firearms by slaves). Why not, with children killing themselves and others periodically in acts of passion or youthful incompetence? The answer is simple – the society as a whole had to endure the losses because the greatest threat laid not with random violence by children or others, but from the incessant, constant threat of animal attack or Native American attack at any time and without warning. This fear was real and palpable on the Frontier, and any other losses attributable to easy access to guns had to be accepted in order to deal with the perceived greater threat.

The Emancipation Proclamation freed approximately 4 million people from slavery in America. The total number of slaves brought from Africa between 1619 and 1808 (the year slavery importation to America was outlawed) numbered approximately 303,000 people. If we exclude the number of people who were born after the death of the last imported slave but died before the end of the Civil War, we are talking about a total of at least 4.3 million people. The current rock bottom, non-federal employee national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If one assumes that the average slave worked a six-day work week (48 hours a week) for 50 weeks a year for 50 years, one comes up with a net unpaid income for American slaves of approximately $3.74 trillion dollars. This does not include recompense for pain and suffering. It does not include the lost wages from any attempts - successful or unsuccessful - to enslave Native Americans. It also does not include the value of any land obtained from Mexican-Americans by dubious and questionable means and rationales, nor does it include the unpaid wages of white indentured servants or the suppressed wages of their progeny and of white immigrants made to unfairly compete for suppressed wages against slave labor.

Black and brown people are our neighbors whether they live right next door, on the other side of town, or in the neighboring city or suburb. There are a lot of things you may feel you need to get along with your neighbors. You may feel that you need a good lawn mower to keep your grass cut. You may feel you need a nice fence so that you and and your neighbor can have some privacy. But when your forbearers have stiffed your neighbors out of at least $3.74 trillion dollars in unpaid wages to their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents and beyond, one of things you are going to strongly feel the need to have is a gun.

We have failed to successfully address gun violence because we have failed to identify and subdue the enemy. The enemy isn’t guns. It isn’t white people. It isn’t white people with guns, and it isn’t black or brown people with guns either. The enemy is the same enemy that President Franklin D. Roosevelt identified in his First Inaugural Address; namely, “fear itself.” Fear of people of color. Fear of confronting, confessing, repenting of, and atoning for an ignominious slavery past. Fear of brown immigrants and fear of past sins to subjugate them as well. And finally, fear of a poor white revolt by “have-nots” who have been duped into the exaltation of their skin hue in exchange for control of their lives, reduction of their wages, and limitation of their potential. This fear keeps us emotionally and spirituality wedded to instruments of violence; instruments which render unto us the coldest of comforts – the comfort of cold steel in our hands, even as we hold cold, dead children in our arms.

This causal relationship between systems of oppression of the past and the present violent state of affairs is not obvious, but it is profound and we all ignore it at our peril. Reparations for American slavery, combined with thorough, public examinations and disquisitions on the same are an essential component of American healing to a better and less violent future. The blood of black and brown children rains daily in the ghetto like the constant mist and drizzle of Seattle. But in white America, it comes in unforeseeable monsoon rains like the rains here in Las Vegas after protracted periods of aridity, washing away scores of people, often mostly white, often mostly young. The wrath of man is upon the oppressed, and so the wrath of the Lord is upon our nation.

Guns are almost always aimed at people in the context of fear, whether or not hate is present. If we want to end gun violence for all, we have to insist on social justice for all, so that we can all be free of fear. Believe it or not, gun control doesn’t start with “gun control” – it starts with justice: slave reparations for blacks, fair and merciful immigration and citizenship policies for brown people, land, and social justice for Native Americans, and economic and educational justice for poor whites. When the love of justice and for our fellow man drives away the fear, the guns go away too.