Quick. In the wake of a racist madman with an illegal concealed firearm gunning down nine innocent people in a church we should:
a. Start to get serious about more strict gun control laws.
b. Address the issues of underlying racism in our country.
c. Make his gun legal.
The National Rifle Association chooses “c.”
Or at least one of its board members, Charles Cotton, said essentially that on a social media site shortly after the massacre. Cotton criticized the widely admired and prominent victim state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a reverend, for voting against legislation in South Carolina that would make carrying concealed weapons in churches, day care centers and other sensitive places legal.
Cotton couldn’t even get his facts straight. Pinckney may have been opposed to such legislation but he didn’t vote against it because that bill had not reached the state senate before he was gunned down.
The NRA pointed out that its board members don’t speak for the organization, but Cotton’s comments are consistent with the official NRA response to every gun massacre: More guns are always the answer. In fact, NRA president Wayne LaPierre said infamously after the gun murders of 20 young children and their teachers in Newtown that, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The church elders at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston would have none of that. They said firmly that while they wanted stepped up security for this and other black churches, they would never allow guns in the pews.
Moreover, church members and relatives of the victims offered forgiveness for the shooter at his arraignment hearing. They were saying that the answer to violence is not more violence; that the answer to hatred is not more of the same. And that the answer to the senseless proliferation of guns in our society is not still more firearms.
Charles Cotton and his NRA live in a world of shoot-outs, where good guys blast away at bad guys after the bad guys have shot some innocent people first — and God only knows how many more innocent bystanders would get caught in all that crossfire from bullets fired by good guys and bad guys alike.
The elders of Mother Emanuel and the relatives of the victims are showing us the way out of all this. The NRA has a prescription to make things even worse. When citizens like the church elders are as powerful and politically influential as the NRA extremists, we will be living in a better country. The answer to the gun murders in Charleston is not more guns in churches or anywhere else.
