This week our entire extended family is renting a house in North Carolina, on the Atlantic coast. It rained for most of today, but we snuck an hour or two in the pool, and during that interval a massive battle broke out. The betrothed, Tay and Nathaniel, led Fiona in a raucous game that involved maneuvering large inflatable sharks and barricading themselves behind and under assorted inner tubes. Grandpa joined in the fun by targeting those who weren’t officially playing, shooting me and my mom, chasing the toddler across the shallow end.
And I tried to teach that toddler how to shoot someone. Now, in my defense, the “gun” was really a frog that sprayed water (not ammunition) from the back of its elongated tongue, but it had a trigger, and, notably, she found it easier to spray herself than anyone else. I’m a bleeding heart liberal, so as I watched her do it, I thought of the thousands of children who die or are injured by gun violence every year; guns are hard to operate properly, after all. They’re heavy, the trigger is tricky; Calliope shot herself in the face over and over before letting me try to turn the thing around.
I really do think it’s different — what my kids and family were playing at — than the rampant disregard for human life we see in our country, in our culture. Though that difference lies entirely in the context in which we live: set apart from gun violence in our quiet suburb, with war on distant coasts and young children easily shielded from the nightly news (we just get it online!). My daughters don’t even begin to associate our water play with violence. Water up their noses, maybe; we were not trying to hurt each other, but to make one other laugh.
Even as I type, though, I wonder when imaginative play becomes problematic. Playing War, a children’s book I use at church, introduces kids to the idea that, indeed, war is deeply troubling, and not something to be joked about. I will forever remember that scene in Witness, when the grandfather, Samuel Lapp, finds young Eli holding the gun of the “English” undercover cop played by Harrison Ford. Samuel explains, ever so cogently, why he’s distressed to see his beloved grandson admiring the gun:
This gun of the hand is for the taking of human life. We believe it is wrong to take a life. That is only for God. Many times wars have come and people have said to us: you must fight, you must kill, it is the only way to preserve the good. But Samuel, there’s never only one way. Remember that. Would you kill another man?
I’m not Amish, and am not even, exactly, a pacifist. But I do believe there’s almost always another way. And I admire the way that this dialogue asks child and viewer alike to examine our certainty in understanding and judging the lives and hearts of others.
Are weapons always bad, though? That’s what I was left wondering this afternoon, and this week, as my kids played in the pool, and as six innocent Sikh men and women were killed in their house of worship on a beautiful Wisconsin Sunday morning. When James Holmes opened fire on an opening night showing of The Dark Knight Rises last month, the national conversation was, rightly, about gun control. Not all weapons are designed for the taking of human life, but the ones he used sure were.
As we begin to come to terms with the violence against the Sikh community of Oak Creek, our narrative is less about weapons and more about bigotry and domestic terrorism, and, again, rightly so. Stephen Prothero suggested that this case is yet another entry in the log of our longstanding “American tradition of bigotry.” What had me thinking in the pool this afternoon was that, unlike in that movie theater in Colorado, a good number of adults in the Sikh gurdwara were carrying weapons. Sort of.
Baptized Sikhs adhere to five articles of faith related to their appearance — among them, covering their unshorn hair, wearing a silver bracelet, and carrying a small sword, or, more often in the US, a small dagger.
The president of the gurdwara or temple did attempt to stop the shooter by wielding his weapon, but he was killed in spite of his efforts.
It’s a tragic mess. His bravery. The shooter’s bigotry.
The Sikh community has had to wage numerous legal battles to win or protect the right of adherents to carry those swords or daggers in different settings — in workplaces and schools, in prisons and through airports. Sadly, despite the protections of the Free Exercise clause, they lose those battles a lot more frequently than, say, the NRA.
Opponents of gun control often suggest that the right to bear (manifold) arms in (multiple) locales is a means of self-defense. I would never knock self-defense, per se, but it’s hard to argue that it’s “Christian.” Jesus, after all, goes to the cross rather than even testifying in his own defense. And there are those who, certainly, believe that the right to bear arms is very much about protecting the innocent (or at least to stave off the tyranny of big government), but those CDF numbers seem to belie guns’ ability to protect rather than harm.
The five articles of the Sikh tradition symbolically represent different convictions. Compelling, and complicating, to me is what the kirpan represents: a responsibility to protect the weak and promote justice. As we learned so sadly, they’re not much as weapons. But that is philosophically unsurprising: Sikhism is a peace-filled tradition; the kirpan isn’t worn as a defense against the world, but as a reminder of the equality of all people. We could use more symbols of that responsibility, even as we need far, far fewer ways to commit violence against one another.