Bump Stocks: Aiding and Abetting the Enemy

This is why we banned bump stocks: Sixty dead. Four hundred and thirteen injured. One gunman.

Again, that's why bump stocks were banned. A massacre at a country music concert. Bump stocks permit terrorists, both domestic and foreign, to modify any semi-automatic rifle to full-auto. Thus modified, they are crude and easily accessible instruments of mass slaughter.

We banned them, and the Supreme Court overturned that ban. The odd arguments offered up by members of the Court about the mechanism involved were obviously, self-evidently immaterial, and the worst form of legalism.

With no training, anyone...I mean anyone...can put an entire magazine downrange in seconds. Reload, then do so again. And then again. Before the Las Vegas massacre, I'd watch gun enthusiast videos about bump stocks, and as they dished about how badass they felt using one, I marveled that they'd not yet been used in a mass shooting. They reduce accuracy, waste ammunition, and are useless for shooting sports. A bump stock would be equally pointless for home defense. But if you're firing into a fleeing crowd, that doesn't matter.

Watching the videos produced by avid gun Youtubers, there was no question about the purpose of a bumpstock. It was a cheap way to circumvent restrictions on full auto machine guns, for funsies. Because what's more fun than blasting away at a target with a couple of hundred rounds? I mean, it would be kind of fun, honestly, in a world where terrorists and psychopaths didn't exist.

But that's not the world we live in. The video above makes that abundantly clear, without commentary or question.

Nor is the world we live in one where making meaningless, obviously specious arguments about trigger mechanisms is anything other than evil. Sure, it's "true," but in the way that willful spin is often "true." We do not limit access to full-auto receivers because we have an issue with receivers. We limit access to full-auto receivers because of what they *do*.

C4 and dynamite aren't the same chemically, but they still blow things up, eh?

A workaround that allows you to do the same thing...to pour hundreds or thousands of rounds into a crowd of warm bodies...violates the obvious intent of restrictions on automatic weapon access.

The sophistry involved in overturning that ban is crude, self-serving, and willfully ignorant. It's argumentation straight out of scholasticism, in which the letter of the law is debated and the intent of the law is ignored. It shows a complete failure to understand the purpose not just of bump stocks, but of the entire system of justice. Overturning that ban poses a threat to law enforcement professionals, to citizens, to all of us.

This is Trump's court, after all, so that should come as no surprise.

Mental Illness and the Courts

This last Friday, I began my day by going to court. It was, finally, time for the hearing for the young man who...impelled by voices...barricaded the entrance to my church. Though the church itself did not press charges, the state did. Law enforcement tends not to smile upon people who refuse to respond to a direct request.

We'd been praying for him in worship, but prayer needs to stir action, and so I'd doing more than that. I'd visited with his family, and visited with him in the state psychiatric institution where he was involuntarily admitted.

So it felt rather peculiar to be subpoenaed by the prosecution as a witness against him. That felt particularly odd as I sat in the courtroom with his family.

The courtroom experience was interesting. There seemed to be two clear types of case before the court that morning.

Most of the folks there were there on minor charges, like possession of drug paraphernalia or DUIs. They came in under their own power. Most had either lawyers or public defenders. Things for them went rather quickly, usually with a guilty plea followed by a commitment to do a treatment program.

Then there were other folks, whose charges were equally minor...typically trespassing. But they didn't enter the court on their own.

They were brought in handcuffed and in shackles, with officers flanking them. These folks appeared to have one primary thing in common. No, they weren't supervillains. They weren't unusually violent, or charged with heinous crimes.

Instead, every one of the shackled souls were rather obviously mentally ill. Several were homeless, or had been until they'd either disturbed the peace or been arrested for trespassing on private property. They were coming from custody at state run institutions. Some seemed to really struggle to understand what was happening to them. Others seemed clearly disoriented and/or agitated.

It was clear that for most of these individuals, cycling endlessly between incarceration and homelessness was the norm. It was the pattern of their lives. One fellow in particular had been through the court more than 25 times. If anything, the whole system seemed woefully dysfunctional, part of a feedback loop that crammed the docket of the court and left, really, no-one for the better.

Back in the middle part of the 20th century, folks like this were typically part of either state-run institutions or homes. But in the 1980s, as part of the "everything government does is wrong" movement, those institutions were defunded and shuttered. The idea was noble: let's put people out into their communities. Let's have localities care for them. Of course, localities didn't have the resources or the infrastructure to deal with the folks being dropped on their doorstep...so they didn't. Now, thirty years later, our mental health system is, for the indigent, desperately threadbare. Left to wander unsupervised and unmedicated, they are funnelled into our system of justice...and out...and in again. They do not compute.

The young man whose actions brought me into court that day seemed more lucid, and had served time, and was released into the custody of a confused but caring family. My hope and prayer is that he escapes the pointless, benighted cycle that our society inflicts on those afflicted with mental illness.

Medical Marijuana in DC

Yesterday, the typically strange state of affairs here inside the Beltway got a little bit stranger. In a vote that surprised basically no-one, the DC Council gave the go-ahead for residents of the District to use medicinal marijuana. There are several significant hurdles still to be cleared, but if they are, those suffering from chronic conditions will be entitled to up to four ounces of da chronic monthly to assist them in ameliorating their suffering. This is good news for many.

I, for instance, suffer from LDSCEDD, an ailment I've had to endure since graduating from elementary school. Fortunately, my Little Debbie Snack Cake Enjoyment Deficiency Disorder is entirely curable through the wonders of medical marijuana, now potentially just a stone's throw away in DC.

Doofy efforts at stoner humor aside, there are those...particularly those suffering from the side effects of chemotherapy, glaucoma, and other illnesses...for whom medical marijuana makes a real difference. Acknowledging this, though, I must 'fess up to being completely out of step with the rest of America on the whole issue of cannabis. Most Americans (typically around 60%) are in favor of medical marijuana. But I've got a real problem with it.

Pot as medication may be efficacious, but it bears no resemblance to other prescribable pharmaceuticals. It's typically smoked, which ain't that great for ya. Wacky tobacky is an impressive melange of psychoactive substances, whose interplay is not entirely clear. If Pfizer produced a substance as chemically amorphous as your average sativa, there's not a chance it would ever get cleared. Still, it does do something...although what that something is simply isn't understood.

Mostly, though, I don't like the idea of medical marijuana because it is clearly a trojan horse. In places like California, where it is the law of the land, marijuana dispensaries bend over backwards to accommodate just about any medical condition. Many have doctors conveeeeniently located on site to pitch out that scrip. Depressed? Smoke some pot. Have anger management issues? Here's a doobie. Have ADHD? This plump sweet sticky bud's what you need...or, at a bare minimum, will give you an excuse for, like, not having it together, man. Though there are some conditions whose symptoms can legitimately be treated with cannabis, that just ain't the way it's playing out.

That folds a peculiar contempt for the law into the law itself. And a law that exists to be broken or as a loophole around other laws just shouldn't be bothered with. That entirely defeats the purpose of the law. So while most Americans, motivated by sympathy for the suffering, feel that cannabis should be made legal for primarily therapeutic use, I disagree.

Unlike the majority of Americans, I think marijuana should be legal. Period. It should be available for those who use it to reduce the suffering caused by an illness. But it should also be available to those who just happen to enjoy it.

The reasons for that are simple. While it's not great for you, it's no worse for you than alcohol and tobacco. Cannabis does not cause the same type of physical addiction as alcohol and nicotine. Unlike alcohol, it is one of the least lethal substances known to man. There is no such thing as a marijuana overdose. It does not lead to violent behavior, unless by "violent behavior" we mean "the presidency of the United States." Yeah, I know, but that's another argument for another time.

Most importantly from a societal perspective, the criminalization of marijuana breeds a contempt for the law. Laws in a democratic republic need to be based on reason, and to be clearly justifiable to a disinterested observer. Cocaine, for instance, is a substance that is radically addictive. It also has major negative impacts on an individual's ability to function as a citizen, not to mention the fact that it turns just about anyone into an impossibly insufferable egotist. We Americans are too self-absorbed already. Substances like meth are even worse.

But pot is not those things. By criminalizing a substance that is comparable in effect to other legal and regulated substances, we have created a "gateway" drug. Despite the fulminations of anti-drug propaganda, it isn't a pharmacological gateway. There is no evidence to suggest that such a thing can even exist.

Instead, it's a sociological gateway. When we establish laws that aren't rational, we create significant subcultures of resistance to the law. When we prosecute individuals for "crimes" that do no significant harm to either the individuals themselves or the communities in which they are located, citizens begin to see the law not as a way of protecting the integrity of our society, but as essentially arbitrary and oppressive. Marijuana, which is easy to produce and obtain and does little harm, has become a significant point of entry into a subculture of illicit drug consumption. That is not it's "fault" as a substance, but rather our fault for enforcing laws around cannabis that have a really shaky conceptual foundation. In the same way that our insane drinking age has created a culture of clandestine binge drinking among our young adults, laws criminalizing marijuana have fueled a culture of disrespect for the legal frameworks that should protect us from truly harmful substances. This does not serve our interests as a people.

So as I watch the District of Columbia start down the same shadowy, disingenuous path as California, I find myself oddly bothered. Why...why...why...can't we just do this right?

Thought Crimes and Misdemeanors

In a recent piece in Vanity Fair magazine, the endearingly and eternally inebriated neoatheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens launched into a prequel of his new book project: dismantling and replacing the 10 Commandments. They are, as he would argue it, a rather quaint bunch of antiquated silliness. They are eminently replaceable. Any highly rational and enlightened individual would be capable of coming up with a vastly superior set of Commandments to govern the lives of humankind.

So that's what he sets about to do. First, of course, he has to explain why the existing Mosaic Decalogue is utterly unacceptable. He's got a bristling quiver of bon mots and whiskey-sharp snark at his disposal, and is as entertaining as always as he deconstructs the Big Ten.

It's not all negative, truth be told. He's OK with the not killing, not stealing, and not adulterificating. He even seems impressed to the point of doing homage when he talks about not bearing false witness. But Hitchens being Hitchens, there's a whole bunch of erudite smackdown going on. One of the more interesting arrows he lets fly comes at the end of his attack, as he goes after the tenth and final commandment. You know, the one about "not coveting."

The primary thrust of his attack is this: Unlike most of the other commandments, this doesn't proscribe a particular behavior. You know, like Don't Kill. Don't Steal. Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys. Instead, the Tenth Commandment asserts that you should not feel a certain way. Instead, a particular pattern of human thought and emotion is prohibited.

Hitchens sees this, points his finger, and in a voice not unlike that of Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, says, "THOOOUGHT CRIME!" As Chrisso sees it, mandating a particular pattern of thought is the nastiest tendency of totalitarian regimes. Your every thought must be of the Dear Leader! Those who do not think in this way will be re-educated!

It's an interesting charge, one that he then goes to further level against Jesus for his provocative statement that even thinking about adultery is as bad in God's eyes as adultery itself. How can you command people to not even think something? How can you say that a person needs to feel a certain way? It's outrageous! Oppressive! Inhuman!

Or so the argument goes.

Here, though, Hitchens seems to have made a rather significant conceptual blunder. He has forgotten the difference between laws and ethics. A legal framework stipulates a particular pattern of behavior, and provides for ways to take folks to the woodshed if they don't comply with that mandate. Laws have to do with specific material actions, with concomitant rewards and punishments. But legal frameworks are not the highest form of governing human behavior. A human being who does not engage in a particular pattern of behavior out of fear of punishment...and would happily do all sorts of unpleasantness if they knew they could get away with it...that human being is not truly moral. They are not "good," not in any meaningful sense.

Morality and ethics, on the other hand, have to do with a deeply internalized set of values. They might involve certain proscribed behaviors, true. But they are ultimately about not just the actions of an individual, but go deeply to that individual's motivations and desires.

When Jesus challenged his legalistic listeners to consider their own desire to schtupp the deliciously zaftig wife of the village rabbi as functionally adulterous, he was getting at the heart of what it means to be a moral being. If the only reason you don't do the humpty hump with another man's wife is because you're afraid of social approbation and/or being stoned to death, then you haven't internalized your own set of values. When you condemn others for doing what you'd do if given half a chance, you are being hypocritically self-righteous.

Further, the inward transformation of human beings is the core purpose of every great human ethical tradition. In the Buddhist Eightfold path, for example, fully half of the paths speak to the nature of our internal lives. Human beings are, according to that tradition, to have right views, to have right intentions, right mindfulness, and right concentration. All of the material manifestations of that system of belief are to flow forth from an inwardly transformed self.

In condensing the 10 Commandments into the Great Commandment, Jesus did essentially the same thing. That Commandment is all about our orientation as beings, as we approach our Creator and on our neighbor. It doesn't command a particular action or set of actions, but rather asserts a particular attitude of our whole being: we are to love God. We are to love neighbor.

While the 10 Commandments do tell us to avoid particular actions that are universal to human brokenness, they are also not an exhaustive legal code. They are a higher level set of guidelines, ones that overarch, encompass, and guide the nattering specificity of legalism. As such, they're closer to a defining ethos than they are to being a legal code.

So when Hitchens confuses a call for personal and ethical integrity with "prosecuting thought crimes," he's critically overreached.

Ah well. At least he's entertaining.

Resentment

Every once in a while, that petty little beast wakes up in me, colors my eye with bitter jaundice and looks around with gritted-teeth irritation at those who are..inadequate.

This Saturday, I took a small group from my church to our local clothing closet for a few hours of sorting and setting out clothing for folks in our community who are struggling financially. I'll bring by clothes for donation often as well. It's an important thing for Jesus people to do. That's not because we're obeying an edict that says "Be Charitable Or Else." It's because real Christian compassion moves people to action...because we love as He loved, and are willing to give to others as freely as He gave himself for us.

As I moved clothes from the giant donation bins to the racks out on the display floor, I found myself growing increasingly irritated. It had been a bustling morning, and my balanced breakfast had been two equally sized cups of coffee...followed by no lunch at all. A caffeine-only diet never works well for my mood, and I could feel my snarkishness rising.

Many of the folks who come to the center in need of clothing move quietly among the racks, selecting work clothes or school clothes for their children. They politely ask the staff for help finding car seats for their children.

Others...well...others don't seem to quite *cough* grasp the system. They gather huge bags of clothes. They holler at their kids every forty seconds or so. They camp out in the back where the volunteers are sorting, hoping to snag choice items before they're set out. They ignore the staff when they're told they have taken too much, and continue to stuff bags full when the facility is closed and they're asked to leave.

Look at them! They are...undeserving! Unworthy! Or so snarled my inner Pharisee, who boiled over with indignation and outrage at these fools who were so clearly the source of their own suffering. If they were the sorts of people who knew How To Follow the Rules, they wouldn't be in this mess. Just look at them! Ignorant! Pushy! Selfish! I could feel myself growing more and more intolerant, along with a strange compulsion to watch FoxNews.

I let that mood run for a few moments, marveling at how easy it must be to live a life thinking this way. I then reminded myself of why my heart compels me to care...even for folks who don't "deserve" it...and with the Apostle Paul's help, stomped that little demon into oblivion.

Yeah, You're a Nice Person, but Jesus Hates You Anyway

One of the biggest sticking points I have with the core evangelical savedness script is the peculiar insistence that Hell is full of people who don't appear to in any conceivable way to have merited eternal damnation.

I was reminded of this while watching the highly entertaining film Ghost Town, in which Ricky Gervais plays an isolated and insufferably misanthropic dentist who ends up able to "see dead people." His partner in practice is a kind, gentle, genial Hindu. Even though he's constantly being graceful and pleasant to his maddening workmate, he's also precisely the sort of person who...according to the Good News of Jesus Christ, American Evangelical Edition...is going to burn forever in the fires of Gehenna as his nice unbeliever flesh is flayed from his nice unbeliever bones by an unrelenting personal incubus.

The reasons that Christians invariably give for this are twofold. First, you can only be saved by Jesus Christ. Not a Christian? Not saved. Of course, that's not how Jesus describes the final judgment in the only place in the Gospels he talks about it directly...but that's a minor detail. We're sure Jesus didn't actually MEAN that.

The second and more prevalent is this: we Christians assert that you are saved by grace, and not by works. Therefore, or so the argument goes, someone who does good but has not proclaimed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is just doing "works righteousness," which is pointless and worthless.

There is, under this rubric, no difference between an "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, stopping, bandaging your wounds, and getting you to the hospital and that same "unbeliever" finding you injured in a wreck, taking your wallet and shoes, punching you repeatedly, and then slitting your throat so you can't tell anyone. From the perspective of the evangelical movement, any distinction between these acts is meaningless to God. Both are equally evil, for the person undertaking them is automatically damned no matter what they think or how they act.

What's most difficult about this for me..beyond it's self-evident disconnect from the idea of "Good News"...is that it seems to radically misrepresent Paul's essential point about works, faith, and righteousness. What are "works?" Well, they're anything you do. Anything. Building a Habitat for Humanity house? That's a work. Popping a cap into some fool who disrespected you? That's a work. Taking a dump? That's a work.

What is Apostle Paul is talking about when he describes "works" that do not save? Random actions? Any actions? Evil actions? No. The "works" being challenged are "works under the law." What Paul is challenging is the idea that obedience to an external code of conduct...in this case, the Torah...has any power to restore our relationship with God. Why?

Because law and legality assume an underlying enforcement through coercion. It's how the state runs. In the contract between a ruler and their people, failure to comply with the terms of a social compact will result in unpleasantness for those who mess up. That ranges from small fines to more unpleasant things, particularly if you live in the district of Sen. Vlad Dracul (R-Transylvania).

But if that's the reason you engage in moral action it means that you are, as Paul puts it, a slave to fear. You are not acting as one moved by Christ's grace, meaning you are not inwardly conformed to God's will through the action of the Spirit. You're just doing what you're told. It's a shallow, meaningless, untransformed obedience, rooted in a terror of divine punishment.

What Paul was doing was to proclaim that through Christ, that whole dynamic was shattered and replaced with an awareness of God's grace. Not God the divine autocrat...but God who moves to change our hearts to the good with a relentless and inexorable grace.

Yet when we see individuals who are not law-driven, when we experience souls that seem driven to show care for others not because fear of God but by some deep upwelling grace, for some reason we feel compelled to declare them damned by the name of Jesus.

In the name of grace, a sizable percentage of Christians are willing to be graceless. To fairly paraphrase Paul, "you who brag about grace, do you dishonor God by showing no grace? As it is written: 'God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'"