Are Guns Really the Problem?

It has been months since I wrote anything on this blog. I suppose that is due to bloggers' burnout. I can also blame it on my need to focus on our ministries among the 38th Family.

This weekend we who watch sports and news saw the reports of the murder-suicide by one of the Kansas City Chiefs football players. Predictably so, the leftists who seek to eliminate guns from your warm, live fingers began anew their rants and raves about the need to ban guns. Forget the Second Amendment. Forget your right to keep and bear arms. Let's do away with such barbarism and let's make it criminal to own a gun.

A friend wrote in protest of some of the editorializing by the sports commentators--especially Bob Costas. I replied to him (with his name deleted for privacy reasons) in the letter you find below. May you put on your "thinking cap" as you read what I have written:

Greetings:

Sadly, we in America have become so disoriented in our thinking that we mistake the instrument as the culprit in both crimes and endeavors in life. We see the economy move one way or another and we blame or give credit to the government, who is the instrument in the hands of both big and small business. We see a man take a life and we blame the weapon the man used. We have lost our moral compass. We do not understand that it is not the instrument, but the man behind the instrument that perpetrated the act, whether good or bad.

We must see our moral compass as a compass that must point to true north; but it is a compass with a gradually-increasing potential for being weighted on the end that points our intended moral direction. This means that if the compass varies too much to the left or the right it will eventually be so weighted that it points south, not north. And when the moral compass points south it is pointing to degradation and destruction.

We have seen nations that point to the extreme right and we see the degradation that occurs in those nations. Palestine is a case in point. There are too many living there that are content to sacrifice decency for the opportunity to kill Jews. Iran is another example that needs little explanation; but given one of the addressees of your note, I will explain anyway. The extreme Islamists of Iran, led by the Ayatollahs and others, despise any group that is not of their persuasion. This includes other groups of Muslims that some label as “moderate;” this also includes any western nation that does not accept and tolerate the extremists’ passion for world dominance.

We in America have long passed the compass that would be pointing to the left. We are progressively pointing farther and farther to the south—so much so that even moderates appear conservative, when in fact they are often pointing to the left of true north. Our “weighty intelligence and wisdom” pulls us down yet more and more each significant moral event that takes place in each generation.

In order, therefore, to protect your invaluable rights listed in the first ten amendments, there must be a move to clean the needle on the moral compass in America. Self-impressed “sages,” such as Bob Costas and others we could name, only indicate the need for the above-mentioned corrective cleaning.

Respectfully,

Dr. Kevin Shearer, Pastor

38th Ave. Baptist Church