Christians and Violence

As most of us who haven’t been living under a rock know, on April 16th, there was a massacre of Virginia Tech. It was a lone gunman, a psychologically disturbed young man, with two handguns who killed 32 people and wounded more before taking his own life.

As an American, I was horrified at the tragedy.

As a Korean-American, I was doubly horrified by the tragedy, and my heart went out to the family. If they’re like most of my fellow KA’s, the parents probably worked sixteen hour days to put their kids through school, put all of their hopes and dreams on their children, and raised them in church environments. To have all of that be so suddenly sundered… it has to be incomprehensible. Reading between the lines of the Cho family statement, I can’t help but shudder at what the family must be going through.

As a father of a 2 year old boy, however, I started thinking about guns.

If there’s anything that the Virginia Tech tragedy showed me, it is that no matter how good the police are, it takes time for them to respond to a shooting in progress. When every second counts, and you have a deranged killer on the loose, I’m not sure that I’d want to wait five minutes, ten minutes, or more for authorities to arrive, set up, and start trying to hunt down the gunman.

Workplace violence is not an unknown occurrence in the United States. Nor is home invasion. And unlike liberals who think that the answer to things like workplace shootings is to outlaw guns, I’m of the mind that the problem is not that there are too many guns, but too few. Not enough of the right kind of people and far too many of the wrong kind of people have guns.

If one of the victims at Virginia Tech had been armed, would Cho really have killed 32 and wounded many more? Or could he have been stopped before the tragedy ran its course? If one of the seven people killed in seven minutes in the Edgewater Technology shooting in Wakefield, MA has been armed, would the shooter really have destroyed so many families that day?

So I’m thinking about getting a gun. After being properly trained, of course, and having taken all of the necessary precautions. I’ve heard from friends who are gun owners, one friend who is a cop and a member of SWAT, and some of the more left-leaning persuasion who think I’m just nuts.

Here’s the thing: What would God think?

I realized in thinking about this issue that my whole life of growing up in the church — sometimes faithfully, other times not so much — I have been told that Christians suffer violence, not commit it. I’ve been taught to turn the other cheek, to forgive my enemies, and to seek justice when Jesus comes again.

Thing about that is… if my family is threatened by a home invasion, or if my own life is threatened by a workplace shooter, I really don’t feel that the right thing to do is to turn the other cheek and get shot down. Jesus might praise me for my pacifism when I get to heaven, but what of my infant son and my newly widowed wife? Is that justice? Is that what my faith demands of me?

The rational person in me thinks, “Don’t be silly — of course you should defend yourself, with deadly force if need be. And if the killer is indiscriminately killing other innocent people, you should take him out if you’ve got the opportunity.”

But it really isn’t quite that simple. If being Christian means anything, then it has to mean taking the teachings of Christ seriously — at least in some fashion. Even if it means ignoring it, or choosing to do something else, it has to mean at least taking it seriously — and then saying, “Well, that ain’t for me.” So what is the Christian stance on doing violence?

The New Testament is filled with stories of martyrdom and suffering violence — but strangely silent on Christians doing violence. There’s the story of Jesus wrecking the temple moneychangers, but nothing about him killing anyone or injuring folks to do that.

The pivotal story I can think of is the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, as related in John 18:10-11 when Peter strikes at those who have come to arrest Jesus, cutting off a man’s ear, which earns an admonishment from Jesus. Jesus heals the man’s ear, and tells Peter to put the sword away.

Well then. If Jesus had been inside Norris Hall at Virginia Tech with a gun, and Cho shows up blasting… would he have shot Cho? Granted — he could work some supernatural miracle, so fine, let’s just make it a modern day Peter. He’s inside Norris Hall, and he has a pistol — Cho shows up blasting. What is he to do?

There some commentary on the Web that suggests that individual Christians may own and use firearms for self-defense. Okay, that’s the answer I want, but where’s that coming from? This blog post from a Christian gun owner is an example of rational, seemingly unarguable conclusions… but my goodness, it’s short on biblical references.

It might be the gun thing that trips people up — that’s fine. Make it a longsword, or a can of mace. Still the issue remains — when are Christians allowed to use violence, if at all?

-TS