Playing With Fire: Kids, Guns, and Faith

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, May 20, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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The Morning Readings

First Reading: From the Associated Press, dated May 15, 2007

CHICAGO --Bubba Ludwig can't walk, talk or open the refrigerator door -- but he does have his very own Illinois gun permit.  The 10-month-old was issued a firearm owner's identification card after his father, Howard Ludwig, paid the $5 fee and filled out the application, not expecting to actually get one.  The card lists the baby's height (2 feet, 3 inches), weight (20 pounds) and has a scribble where the signature should be.  The cards are required of any Illinois residents purchasing or possessing firearms or ammunition within the state. There are no age restrictions regarding the age of applicants, an official said.  Howard Ludwig applied for the card after his own father bought the 10-month-old a 12-gauge shotgun as a gift. The weapon will probably be kept at Ludwig's father's house until the boy is at least 14. 

Second Reading: “Declaration of Independence” by Carmen Ellingsworth, edited

To understand the art of warfare
Remember the games of your childhood.
Remember the justice
In sticks and stones,
How fight made right.
Remember the glory
In forts and lairs,
How passwords winnowed.
How silence meant safety.
Remember the victory
In older and bigger,
How small still ruled smaller.
Then, remember that it was only a game.
And that we were only children.

 

Third Reading:  An actual letter written to the President of the United States:

April 29, 1994

Dear Mr. President,                                         

I want you to stop the killing in the city. People is dead and I think that somebody might kill me. So would you please stop the people from deading. I’m asking you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it. Do it. I know you could.

Your friend, James.

James was killed in a drive by shooting on May 8th, 1994. He was 9-years-old.

The Sermon

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Dorchester, Roxbury, Gaza, Jerusalem, Beirut, Baghdad: Are children born violent, or do they have violence thrust upon them?

I am standing on the steps of a church, not unlike the one in which I grew up.  “They are coming,” someone shouts.  “O my God,” whispers the woman next to me.  “I can’t believe they are actually here, on our street!”  Hisses and boos begin.

And there they are, rounding the corner: thirty-five women and men.  They are surrounded by police cars and police motorcycles.  Troopers on foot push back the crowd.  Someone spits.  A rotten cabbage flies down from a roof.  A beer bottle smashes in the street.  This is the first time a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender group has marched in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  Next to me, on the steps of the church, a priest yells, “Shame, shame, shame!” and turns his back.  Others follow the example.

Moved by all I cannot change, I look away.  And then I see them, near the doors of the church.  I see a young mother and her son.  She is bending down to pick up a rock.  She thrusts it into the hand of her five year old.  In a loud voice she says:  “Throw it, throw it hard!  Kill the fags!”

On nights I cannot sleep, I often think of that mother.  I wonder what would have happened that day if she had put a gun in his hand instead of a rock?  On nights I cannot sleep, I often think of that little boy, who is probably twenty years old this spring.  I wonder if anyone ever whispered to him about the worth and dignity of all human life?  I wonder if he played with guns while he was growing up?  I wonder if he honed his marksmanship with video games?   I wonder if he watched his father head off to hunt on weekends?  I wonder if there is a real gun in his house?  I wonder if someone is already dead because of what was placed in his heart. I wonder if someday he will kill me because I am a fag.

The Rev. Dana McLean Greeley once wrote: “We need faith in people, in their dignity and their potential and their good intentions . . . faith such as will bring out the best in them and the best in us also.”

Can we have faith in people when, in their hands, they hold guns?  Can we have faith in our children when, in their hands, we place guns?

It is estimated that eight children and teens are killed in America every day by firearms.  It is estimated that seventy-two adults die in America every day to gun violence.  That is 29,000 sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, wives, husbands, lovers, and partners. 29,000 lives ended by a gun in a hand.

And still, still, our Unitarian Universalist faith teaches the inherent worth and dignity of all people.  While many religions believe that humanity is inherently evil and stained by sin, our proud and ancient faith proclaims that each person contains the spark of divinity within them.  While many faiths teach original sin, we look for original blessing.  No one needs to be saved from on high.  We believe that the innate goodness of each person’s soul can be cultivated and nurtured here on earth.

Is this radical belief in humanity a great spiritual insight?  Or, is our Unitarian Universalist faith hopelessly naïve?  In affirming the inherent dignity and worth of people, are we ignoring a history of human butchery: two world wars: the genocide of millions in Armenia, Europe, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and today, in the Sudan?  Are we ignoring centuries of brutal colonialism and our current imperialism?  Are we forgetting about collateral damage and the torture of detainees?   Are we turning a blind eye to the ongoing battle for religious and economic supremacy?  Are we ignoring so many hands holding so many guns? 

Are we wrong to have faith in one another?

Geoffrey Canada, a celebrated author and expert in youth violence, grew up in the harsh realities of the Bronx.  Yet, he writes: “As an adult I have heard many times the debate about whether violence is part of the human makeup or a learned behavior.  There is no way that I can buy the theory that humans have some genetic predisposition to violence.  I know better.  I remember clearly the time in my life that I knew nothing of violence and how hard I worked later to learn to become capable of it.” (Fist, Stick, Knife Gun, p. 21)

Geoffrey Canada, and so many behavioral scientists, believe that we teach our children how to be violent, that we actually destroy their natural goodness through acculturation. We teach them by rationalizing certain behaviors.  We teach them through what they are allowed to experience.  We teach them through their play, through their entertainment, through what is permitted in the home and the school, and through the intrinsic values they see acted out around them.

Geoffrey Canada writes:  “America has long had a love affair with violence and guns.  It’s our history, we teach it to all of our young.  The [American] Revolution, the “taming of the West,” the Civil War, the World Wars, and on and on.  Justice, righteousness, freedom, liberty—all tied to violence.  Even when we try to teach about non-violence, we have to use the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., killed by the violent.  I’m sorry, America, but once you get past the rhetoric what we really learn is that might does make right.”  (p. x)

This American ideal of justice by violence and retribution is, in part, a religiously created ideal.  Its roots are spiritual.  This country was founded, in part, on conservative Christian values.  Those values are the same values perpetuated in conservative Christian, Jewish and Islamic images of a wrathful God.  What happens in a culture that worships a God who demands bloody punishment for wrongs?  “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” and “he smote all. . . with the edge of the sword.”  If religion teaches that we should model our behavior on God, then is it any wonder violence is commonplace?

Spurred on by this core religious value, justice by violence has infused the popular culture we devour daily.  Noted film critic A.O. Scott comments: “Revenge has been a staple of American films for most of their history, but lately it has begun to seem like the only thing our movies (or perhaps our movie audiences) can understand . . . [it] occupies a special, even a central place in the mythology of the United States.  [It is] what literary critic Richard Slotkin calls the American tradition of regeneration through violence.”  (New York Times, May 2, 2004, AR 24)

If these moving graphic images are our society’s scripture, is it any wonder so many of our children play with violence?  They are, after all, practicing the religion of the righteous.

But there is a great price for placing guns, even toy guns, in our children’s hands.

One classic study shows that college age students who were simply exposed to the sight of a gun acted more aggressively towards peers than those who were not shown a gun (Berkowitz, L. & LePage, A. (1967). Weapons as aggression-eliciting stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 202-207).  In another classic study, called the “Bo-Bo Experiment,” a researcher watched children who played in a room filled with many toys, including Bo-Bo, one of those blow-up “sock-it” clowns that bounce back when you punch them in the nose.  Researchers found that if an adult hit Bo-Bo, the kids would follow suit.  If the adult didn’t hit Bo-Bo, then the kids were less likely to hit (Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive Models, Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Ross [2] (1961), First published in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582).

Harvard’s Deborah Prothrow-Stith wrote last month in The Boston Globe: “It matters what we say to our children.  It matters how we are entertained.  It matters when we watch superheroes solving problems violently.”  (“Dueling and Youth Violence,” April 30, 2007)

I kept thinking about this three weeks ago, when, on a family vacation to Orlando we visited the Disney/MGM Studios Theme Park. To the delight of the children in the audience, Muppet Vision 3-D, a family film, ended as Muppets began shooting guns at each other.  An hour later, at the “Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular” it was more of the same as live actors fired handguns and machine guns at one another.  Even “Lights, Motors, Action,” which was supposed to be a car and motorcycle stunt show, was filled with still more guns firing and firing and firing.  This was a family vacation theme park, this was Disney, this was two weeks after the Virginia Tech slaughter, and you could not escape the normalization of guns and violence.

According to the American Psychiatric Association: “The debate is over. Over the last three decades, the one overriding finding in research . . . is that exposure to . . . portrayals of violence increases aggressive behavior in children."  (Web site for American Psychiatric Association, Psychiatric Effects of Media Violence)

This violence is amplified when we allow our children to play violent video games.  Video games literally train our children out of their humanity.  And this is how.  I shared three months ago in a sermon that “at the end of World War II, US army researchers discovered that our boys over seas had a terrible “kill rate.”  Army research showed that in World War II, seventy-five to eighty percent of the American soldiers in combat did not fire at another human being. “That means that for every 100 soldiers who got a clear shot at the enemy, only 15 [to 20] actually fired.”   The US military “concluded they had to find some way to overcome this human impulse against killing. They turned to something called ‘operant conditioning,’ a process that, over hundreds of repetitions, conditions a person to do just as the trainer wants - without thinking, simply as a reflex.”  “In the US military, the operant conditioning took the form of ever-more sophisticated target practice,” taking the thought out of killing. Round targets were replaced by “human silhouettes, then pop-up human forms.”  What was the result of this conditioning?  “It helped raise U.S. military kill rates to 55 percent by the Korean War, and 90 percent by the war in Vietnam.” (Grossman, "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society) 

Now, in today’s high tech world, our soldiers train with realistic video simulations of combat.  These are the exact same first person shooter video games our kids play at home. What these violent video games do is reduce reaction time, reduce thinking time, so that when you perceive a threat, you act without thinking.  Our children are being taught to react without taking time to think about what they are doing.  That is how you get a high score: shoot instantly, react instantly.  That is how you kill a young person’s ability to reason and discern.  That is how you kill a young person’s access to their inherent goodness.  That is how some young people will kill someone else.

Geoffrey Canada says this lack of reaction time, mixed with an increasingly easy access to guns, is complicating the violence of our times.  In the past, young people would get in fights, using their fists. It is harder for a person to disassociate from the violence they are committing when they are feeling every impact their fists are making.  Violence by fists takes time, it gives time for thinking, getting yourself back under control, and stopping before real damage is done.  Fistfights give time for peer groups to stop it if it gets out of control.  But now, easy access to guns means that fists are no longer the weapons of choice.  Now, the act of violence can happen in an instant, it can happen from a distance, it can happen with no physical contact to awaken a human response.

So, the question for us as liberal religious people seems clear.  What is it that we will choose to place into the hands, into the hearts, into the consciousness of our children?

A friend of mine, Terry, said to me recently: “If my son wants to play with guns, I can’t stop him.  He wants to play war.  It’s just what boys do.”  I respond, rather crudely: “If your child wanted to go outside and play with piles of dog excrement, would you let him?  Would you say: “That’s what boys do, I can’t stop him.”  Why are we so different when it comes to playing with guns and video games and war?  Why are we so different when it comes to movies of destruction?  Why are we so different when it comes to violent music and lyrics?  Why are we so different when it comes to easy access to firearms?  Why are we so casual about what can kill the spirit and the goodness and the body?

In the Jewish scriptures, the 30th Chapter of Deuteronomy says:” I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

Sometimes, in order to say “Yes!” to life we must be willing to say “No!” to something else.  Sometimes “No” is the greatest gift we can give our children.  Sometimes “No” is the greatest gift we can give our world.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith must have the courage to say “No!”  “No, this is not acceptable.”  “No, this is dangerous.”  “No, we will not let our children be exposed to this.”  “No, we will not endorse or support or participate in or vote for this.”

We must say to our children: “No, you belong to a different kind of religion, one that cares deeply about you and everyone who is alive.  You are part of a wonderful web of life.  And to harm any part of it, even in make believe, is to do something hurtful, something dangerous, something wrong.”

Placing this “No!” in a child’s outstretched hand is far better than placing there a rock, placing there a gun, placing there the permission to play with death.

Blessed Be.  Amen.

Copyright 2007© Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved