Rising gun violence amid pandemic points up bishops’ call for commonsense gun laws

Also from the article:

Homicides only accounted for about 35 percent of the nearly 40,000 U.S. firearm deaths in 2017, whereas self-inflicted firearm deaths accounted for about 60 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Center for Health Statistics.

Suicide and crime are on the rise for many reasons, gun laws are a bandaid and do not really fix anything

South America has very strict gun laws but are still very full of violent crime

Well, the good bishop may not want to acknowledge the way things are now as "the new normal", but society is going to continue to degrade, because that's where America and the West are at right now, and as I believe I have mentioned before, we are no longer living in Mayberry in 1955.

When it comes to "new normals", I shudder to think what normal is going to be like after November. We could be in anything from refusals to accept the election results as genuine right up to a full-scale civil war. I hope I'm wrong. But I am not optimistic about the post-election period this coming November.

I once got into a conversation with our former priest about guns in America. He carried on a long time about how nobody needs an AR-15 or high capacity magazines, etc. I am a hunter, shooter, and gun owner, and I agreed with some of what he said. He talked a long time with me about these things, and his thoughts to change the problem.

As soon as I shifted and said the real problem in America is the breakdown of the Family, he was out of there so fast and the conversation was over. He didn't want any part of that ministry.

The clergy's job is not gun laws, it's salvation. When they remember that and have that impact, gun laws will be less of an issue.

Cain killed Able with a rock - it's not a gun problem, it's a heart problem.

Markie Boy said:

I once got into a conversation with our former priest about guns in America. He carried on a long time about how nobody needs an AR-15 or high capacity magazines, etc. I am a hunter, shooter, and gun owner, and I agreed with some of what he said. He talked a long time with me about these things, and his thoughts to change the problem.

As soon as I shifted and said the real problem in America is the breakdown of the Family, he was out of there so fast and the conversation was over. He didn't want any part of that ministry.

The clergy's job is not gun laws, it's salvation. When they remember that and have that impact, gun laws will be less of an issue.

Cain killed Able with a rock - it's not a gun problem, it's a heart problem.

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I've had a lot of those conversations as well. They never want to address the underlying problems that give rise to gun violence, which basically boil down to the lack of a moral society; they'd rather blame guns, because guns are an easy scapegoat.

But, as Britain and Australia have shown, when you ban guns, the only thing that happens is that people start using knives, screwdrivers, hammers, box cutters, etc. in place of the guns. And while it can be argued that you can't kill as many people at one time in one place with a screwdriver, you certainly can if you use various other methods. Timothy McVeigh did not kill 168 people with a screwdriver; he used a fertilizer bomb.

Michie said:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, prayed for the dead on the first anniversary in early August of the mass shooting at a Walmart in his city, he made that solemn tribute in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which has kept much of the U.S. public in social-distancing mode.

The level of gun violence, however, has not been reduced in the five months that Americans have sheltered in place and reduced public activity.

Those numbers have actually risen, according to statistics released by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that catalogs every incident of gun violence in the United States, with 56 mass shootings reported in May.

“We cannot simply accept it as the new normal,” Seitz told Catholic News Service.


Firearm deaths rose by 16 percent in April and 15 percent in May, compared to the same months in 2019, with urban areas — experiencing increased unemployment and the stress of spikes in COVID-19 cases and deaths — bearing the brunt of the violence, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows.

“For several decades, the bishops in the United States have been talking about gun violence and proposing different ways to encounter it, including reasonable measures of gun control to prevent guns from falling into the hands of folks who are going to do harm to others or to do harm to themselves,” said Michael B. O’Rouke, policy adviser for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Lobbying for reasonable gun laws on the state and federal level has continued among the U.S. bishops, who see this as a pro-life issue.

Continued below.
Rising gun violence amid pandemic points up bishops' call for commonsense gun laws

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The same year that #DefundThePolice is a thing and emergency calls get ignored, these geniuses want tighter gun laws?

The left has lost the gun control argument for at least the next generation. Maybe forever.

Granted, I am a knuckle dragger, but I thought proper gun control was sight alignment and trigger pressure...

thecolorsblend said:

The left has lost the gun control argument for at least the next generation. Maybe forever.

Click to expand...

Good! Good.

Michie said:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, prayed for the dead on the first anniversary in early August of the mass shooting at a Walmart in his city, he made that solemn tribute in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which has kept much of the U.S. public in social-distancing mode.

The level of gun violence, however, has not been reduced in the five months that Americans have sheltered in place and reduced public activity.

Those numbers have actually risen, according to statistics released by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that catalogs every incident of gun violence in the United States, with 56 mass shootings reported in May.

“We cannot simply accept it as the new normal,” Seitz told Catholic News Service.


Firearm deaths rose by 16 percent in April and 15 percent in May, compared to the same months in 2019, with urban areas — experiencing increased unemployment and the stress of spikes in COVID-19 cases and deaths — bearing the brunt of the violence, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows.

“For several decades, the bishops in the United States have been talking about gun violence and proposing different ways to encounter it, including reasonable measures of gun control to prevent guns from falling into the hands of folks who are going to do harm to others or to do harm to themselves,” said Michael B. O’Rouke, policy adviser for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Lobbying for reasonable gun laws on the state and federal level has continued among the U.S. bishops, who see this as a pro-life issue.

Continued below.
Rising gun violence amid pandemic points up bishops' call for commonsense gun laws

Click to expand...

That last line - they see this as a pro-life issue. I have heard far more clergy complaints about gun laws than abortion.

How much of the clergy is on the Left??? Any guesses?

Markie Boy said:

That last line - they see this as a pro-life issue. I have heard far more clergy complaints about gun laws than abortion.

How much of the clergy is on the Left??? Any guesses?

Click to expand...

It's kind of hard to say. Certainly there are fewer of them (the radicalized ones, at least) than there were when I was a kid, when you had priests holding signs in peace marches and the Berrigan brothers were pulling all their shenanigans. But I'd say that while the slant of many clergy today may be quite lefty, they're quieter about it. Usually they try to tie it up into "social justice" issues (how I utterly loathe that term!) like racial equality and abolishing abortion, and whatnot.

The gun control thing is another societal issue that some clergy try to push by applying a veneer of Catholic teaching on it; it's similar to their support for open borders/illegal aliens and the opposition to the death penalty. And while I can understand their view on some of these topics, I wonder if they truly understand what the long-range consequences of those viewpoints would be.

For example, let's just take gun control, since that's what we're discussing. Let's just say, for the purposes of our illustration, that total, complete, 100% gun control was enacted tomorrow. Firearms could only legally be held by the military, the police, and Federal agents. Hunters could still have sporting rifles or shotguns, but the shotguns would be breech-load, single-shot models, and the rifles would have to be bolt-action, and limited to three shots---ammunition would be very, very tightly regulated. Handguns, of course, would be completely verboten.

What would happen? Well, the anti-gun crowd (including, I assume, Catholic clergy of that slant), would rejoice, figuring that "Now we've done away with the guns, and so there will be no more gun violence! Hooray!"

The only fly in the ointment is that A) it wouldn't do a thing to stop the violence; and B) it also wouldn't stop the preponderance of firearms in the hands of criminals. It's nice to think that in an upright, moral, civilized country, there would be no need for civilians to own firearms. But we're not an upright, moral country; at least now any more, if we ever were. We murder our children, we allow vast amounts of corrosive poisons onto our streets, we shrug at some of the most titanic injustices perpetrated by our politicians, our popular culture and entertainment is crass, vulgar, and profane, and we embrace practically every form of sexual perversity and depravity known to man on an ever-increasing scale, and force it into the mainstream by means of law.

So we are not an upright, moral people; and people who are not upright and moral do not control themselves well with regards to treating their fellow man with upright, moral principles. Criminals, if deprived of firearms, would simply take to using the old tried-and-true methods of hand-to-had combat that go all the way back to Cain and Abel: knives, clubs, chains, barbecue forks, lengths of pipe, gasoline bombs, homemade explosives, homemade firearms, and yes, even bows and arrows. You cannot suppress violence without first changing the heart of the people prone to engaging in it---the weapons may change, but the underlying problem is still there, festering away.

This, however, is irrelevant as far as guns on the street goes anyway, because you can pass all the anti-gun laws in the world, and it will not stop guns falling into the hands of criminals. Even if every last firearm in America was magically confiscated, you'd still have guns on the streets. How do we know this? Easy: people like to point out that Britain and Australia enacted gun control laws, with varying levels of success; and I like to point out that Britain and Australia are both islands, sharing borders with nobody. The United States, however, shares a 1,954 mile long border with Latin America, over which flows more than 2000 metric tons of illegal drugs into the country every year. So.....if there are no more guns in the country, and people want them, what's to stop the cartels and other enterprising businesses south of the border from shipping guns into the country along with all of the dope they're importing?

The bottom line is that gun control is a fool's dream, similar to looking for the Lost Dutchman Mine; it's a nice idea, but it ain't never gonna happen. The only thing that gun control will do is to allow the criminals to run amok, with no way for the decent people to defend themselves; and even worse, it would allow for a tyrannical government to run amok, with no way for the people to control them.