gun laws – Engaging Peace

Participants at vigil, Sherborn, MA, August 6, 2019, commemorating Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and latest mass shootings in the USA. Photo courtesy of Lewis Randa, the Peace Abbey

by Dot Walsh

In the years from 1982 to the present, there have been 110 mass shootings in the United States; according to statistics, 107 of these have been perpetrated by young to older men.

As I reflect on the carnage and suffering engulfing our country, I am bewildered and angered by how our Congress has resisted passing a simple law banning assault weapons and requiring a background check for all gun buyers, including those who buy guns online. Something has gone very wrong in this country when we cannot see clearly what is happening or gather the courage to stand up for the values that will promote peace and love.

Some men and women do show that courage. Among them are a group of people who have been standing up and speaking out, holding vigils, and praying for many years, remembering the people who bear the suffering that comes with the loss of their loved ones to violence.

The Life Experience School and friends gathered Tuesday, August 6, 2019, at the Peace Memorial in Sherborn, Massachusetts, to honor those who were killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The group gathered at the Stone that memorializes all victims of violence, both past and present.

To promote resistance to violence, I want to send a message to all the young men in our country who are being abused by corporate America and taught to hate. Social media, Hollywood, and others have gained power over you and led you down a path of ignorance and submission. But you have been gifted by a Higher Power with talents and energy as yet undiscovered. Stop for one minute and list in your mind two things you are grateful for. Then ask yourself how you can pay forward for the gifts you have received. We all have reasons to be thankful for living in this country. Maybe the problem facing the country today is not having enough positive role models and not absorbing enough LOVE in our hearts to take a stand to make things right. Can you become one of those role models? Can you find and share the love in your heart?

References: Washington Post Statista research department

Dot Walsh is a Peace Chaplain. Shi is also host of Oneness and Wellness, a cable TV show from Dedham, Mass.She is dedicated to changing the world with peace and love.

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, Now’s your chance to get it right. Be the candle, be the light. Be the beacon, be the dove. Be the voice of peace and love.

In his new book, Moral Disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves, psychologist Albert Bandura does a masterful job of showing how, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA) promotes moral disengagement to promote arms sales at all costs.

For example, leaders of the NRA have offered moral justifications (or at least pseudo-moral justifications) for unlimited arms sales, asserting, for example, that if the German people had been armed during the Holocaust, “we wouldn’t have had the tragedy we had there.”

NRA spokespeople also make generous use of euphemistic labeling to sanitize the activities of the gun industry—essentially equating guns with free speech, and portraying gun laws as a form of governmental gag order.

The NRA leadership also make ample use of the moral disengagement process of advantageous comparison, suggesting that if it was not immoral for people at Honeywell to make nuclear weapons components, then there certainly can’t be anything wrong with making and selling guns. Charlton Heston, former president of the NRA, invoked the Nazi persecution of Jews as a rationale for buying arms.

Another moral disengagement mechanism that Bandura identifies in the NRA arsenal is diffusion and displacement of responsibility. How could it be the fault of the gun industry, NRA proponents ask, if guns fall into the wrong hands and good people don’t have the guns they need to protect themselves from the bad guys?

In our next post, we will consider additional mechanisms of moral disengagement used by the arms industry to get people to arm to kill, and ways to combat their tactics.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology