On September 2, the military of the United States of America launched a missile attack against a small private boat off the coast of Venezuela. Drug smugglers, the U. S. Department of Defense said later, explaining the deaths of 11 unnamed people on the boat. That invocation of drugs was enough, they assumed, to justify their action, deemed illegal by international maritime law. More than 80,000 people in the United States died of drug overdose in 2024, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.
By comparison, more than 44,000 people in the United States died by gun shot, many by suicide. Since 2020, firearms have remained the overall leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1-19, numbering 3,500 in 2023. Gun violence was illustrated dramatically two weeks ago when 22-year-old Tyler Robinson positioned himself on a campus roof top and used a vintage bolt-action rifle once owned by his grandfather to fire a single, deadly shell into the neck of Charlie Kirk.
A bag of cocaine and a .30-06 shell are similar in one important respect: they are both inanimate objects, incapable of moving or striking or inserting or killing unless manipulated by a human person. They are also different in one important respect: guns are legal to own and carry in the United States, according to how this current Supreme Court interprets the U. S. Constitution; drugs, on the other hand, have no such protection. Which explains, mostly, why guns and gun violence have not entered the public conversation following the murder of Charlie Kirk.
That is a shame.
Two weeks earlier, in Minneapolis, a young man pointed a gun through the open window of Annunciation Catholic Church and opened fire. Two children died and another 18 people were injured. One week after the Kirk murder, a disgruntled man lay in wait at the home of his ex-girlfriend and ambushed police officers who had come to arrest him. Three of the officers died, as did the assailant.
All of this is tragedy, yet none of this was sufficient to generate any public discussion about guns, gun violence, and gun deaths.
Kirk himself is on record, many times, expressing his conviction: “We can have fewer gun deaths, with more fathers in the home and more armed guards in the schools…. It is worth the cost of some gun deaths every year so we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
I wonder if his two young children will eventually embrace that same sentiment: “Yes, it was worth growing up without my dad so somebody else can carry a gun.” I wonder if his widow, now raising these two pre-school children, is as committed to that principle of wide-open gun culture.
I wonder if the parents and grandparents of Tyler Robinson are struggling with their own history of gun ownership. Will they say, “It was worth it. I am glad we did it. I would do it again.”
Or will they wish that some spirit-filled, gospel-preaching evangelist—Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, perhaps—had come through their small Utah town in 2020 and urged them and their neighbors to lay down their weapons, to lay them down on the altar of God, to lay them down on the altar of God as a public sign of following Jesus. I wonder if Matt and Amber Robinson now think they could have provided a healthy, hopeful childhood for their son Tyler only without the guns on the wall and the guns in their hands.
There are more guns in the United States than people, we are told by experts who study such things. And among us there are people who claim that is not enough: we need more guns at home, more guns at school, even more guns at church—all as a strategy of protection. Such people are organized and powerful and flush with cash to push back on any official effort to curtail the number of guns in the homes and cars of Americans.
But there is another way. There is a better way. It is the way of Jesus. It is the way expressed by our Lord when he told his defenders, “Put away your swords.” It is the way articulated in the old negro spiritual, “I’m going to lay down my sword and shield…. Not going to study war no more.” It is the way my Mom and Dad practiced all their days: a home without guns, a life without guns, a Jesus without guns.
I give thanks to God.
