I've said this before when this topic has been opened.
I am not adverse to self-defense--I have carried a weapon before, both in and out of uniform, and I expect to again in the near future. I've seen the bodies of men, women, and children, totaling hundreds, that I targeted. Saw a man running for his life, dashing into what he thought would be safety, not knowing that very building bore the mark of destruction that I painted on it.
I've been on a street in DC with a mugger's pistol poked into my kidney, and I've been in a jungle with a slew of AK-47s pointed at me. I've been shot at and, thank God, missed. That mugger poked his gun into my side and pulled the trigger--not realizing that he was pushing so hard into my side that he'd pushed the slide out of battery and jammed his own gun.
I have been though enough "stuff" in my life to understand that to be truly effective with a firearm in the cases American gun owners so blithely expect--situations in which one is always placed at tactical disadvantage at a moment and place of the assailant's choosing--takes an extreme amount of constant training and dedication.
This is more than police get and even more than most soldiers get because those people usually imitate their confrontations. Police and soldiers on duty will not be with their families deeply engrossed in an Avenger's movie, tossing back popcorn, when a terrorist suddenly stands up and opens fire into the auditorium.
To truly be ready for that kind of situation calls for "giving yourself to the gun." It means doing tactical training twice a week and constantly living in "condition yellow" whenever not actually asleep. It means evaluating every situation you are in as one in which you will potentially be attacked and evaluating every person you see and meet as someone you will potentially have to kill.
Otherwise, you're actually just fooling yourself..you're not truly ready for those situations and are really depending on the bad guy
shooting someone else first to give you several seconds to come to your senses and think about what to do with your gun.
So now, if we take our mission on this earth to be one of evangelizing the gospel of Christ and giving witness to the love of Christ, then we are supposed to see every new person as a potential brother in Christ.
Is it possible to do all the constant training truly necessary to be proficient with a gun, to gain that constant ready-to-kill mindset, to look at each person as someone you may have to kill...and at the
same time look at each person as a potential brother in Christ?
Can you give yourself to the gun and to the gospel at the same time and claim to be proficient at both? Or does proficiency in one or the other have to suffer?
Do not envy a violent man or choose any of his ways -- Proverb 3:31
On this particular issue of the compatibility of the Gospel with the gun, the life of Nate Saint gives me pause and instruction.
On a mission to evangelize a particularly violent South American Indian tribe--so violent they were on the verge of wiping themselves out--Nate Saint contemplated the choice of using a gun for self-defense made the decision: "I am prepared to meet my maker--they are not."
In the end, at the critical moment of killing or being killed--he chose not to defend himself and was killed. His son later took up that same mission and successfully evangelized the very man who had killed his father.
Declares the Lord: "I take no pleasure in the death of a wicked man; I would rather than he repent."--
Ezekiel 33
I may carry a gun, particularly if I am with my family, but I'm not going to give myself to it. Nor am I going to convince myself that there is ever anything "righteous" about killing an evil man, even if I should do so. Killing a "wicked man" is not a win for God, it is a tragedy for God...another soul lost. It is a win for Satan and reason for grief.
