Guns and the church's moral duty

By Vicki Gray, January 28, 2011

[Episcopal News Service] Once I was a Foreign Service officer, a political officer trained to look at a host society and try to understand what makes it tick.

After many years spent living abroad, I've become accustomed to looking at my own country in much the same way: as an outside observer, seeking to make sense of an often-jumbled mosaic. And one thing I've always stumbled over -- that makes no sense to me -- is America's obsession with guns and our inability reasonably to regulate their possession.

How can one make sense of such inaction in a country where there are 90 guns for every 100 people -- man, woman, or child -- our nearest competitors being Yemen, a country afflicted by tribal strife and occupied in part by al Qaeda (61 guns per 100), and Switzerland, where every adult male is required by law to own a rifle as part of a well-regulated national militia (46 per 100)? Why do we tolerate more gun deaths every week on our city streets than on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq combined? How do we explain an annual rate of gun deaths 20 times higher than in any other industrialized democracy?

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