Local opinion: Thoughts, prayers and vigils are complicity

I recently overheard a woman say “we can look to God for help, but he’s not inclined to save us from ourselves.” She was talking about a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. I reflected on how we roil from one mass shooting into another, doing our best to clean up each mess with thoughts, prayers, vows, and vigils. God may hear us, but apparently he’s not inclined to save us from ourselves.

Guns have been elevated to almost-celestial status as though they were anointed by God as a natural right of man, like speech. As such, “gun rights” are defended with religious fervor. Why wouldn’t they be, if “firearms” are merely extensions of human “arms”? I suppose that explains the origin of the word “firearms.” But the firearm is not “natural” like speech is natural. In the language of the Declaration of Independence, we are endowed by our Creator with natural rights, “speech” being one of them because all humans have vocal cords. Humans, however, are not born with firearms as natural extensions of their arms.

When you stop to think about it, if everything about guns is human crafted, then everything about guns could be human managed, mitigated, or even prevented. Moreover, if it’s “natural” for man to try to survive as a species, whether God-generated or not, then it should be “natural” for the species to save as many lives as possible. Anything less would be “unnatural”, such as the species eating its own kind. In short, man is not, nor should he be, “helpless” to do something, perhaps many things, to save the lives of his fellow man. “Helplessness” then is man-made, just as the guns themselves are man-made. Thoughts, prayers, vows, and vigils are, like silence, complicity in man-made helplessness.

On the subject of helplessness, guns, and natural rights, there is also the natural right of “eyesight” which, like vocal cords being accompanied by speech, has its own companions — metaphors for other kinds of “sight” accompanied by man’s ability to reason to survive and thrive. As I “see” it, besides eyesight, there are six other kinds of sight, starting with “can’t see the forest for the trees” (“near-sight”, “far-sight”).

“Near-sighted” means we can only perceive our own self-serving desire to protect our guns, without being able to see the damage gun violence does to the culture and the very idea of America.

“Far-sighted” means seeing that the perceived-as-sacred Second Amendment prevents us from seeing what’s closest to us, our families and friends who will become victims.

The repeated cycles of violence give us the “foresight” to see what will happen tomorrow if we change nothing that is man-made. Similarly, in “hindsight” we can mourn, but we can’t undo. We can’t forget, but we can see what we could have done but didn’t. Foresight and hindsight are inextricably connected — one is for prevention, the other is for mourning.

Foresight and hindsight together — the metaphor for “narrow sight.” As you look through the hindsight of the gun barrel, you line up the target through the foresight near the tip of the barrel. You then narrowly see only what the two sights give you. You cannot see peripherally, and you choose not to see anything other than the target. If the human being chooses not to see or care that the target is another human being with a family, and then pulls the trigger, the man-made and man-destroyed choices are neither inevitable nor inexorable. It is a human choice. We can choose to be narrow-sighted and look down the barrel of a gun (our present and our past) or we can choose all of the human sightedness combined (the future) to achieve the most important human sight of all, Creator-endowed “insight.”