Finding New Ways to Stop Gun Violence, Especially in the US

Finding New Ways to Stop Gun Violence in America

Learning to Acquire “the Mind of Christ”

by Minister Paul J. Bern

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I could start by writing at length how sick and tired people have become of America’s gun violence problem. I’m skipping all that. The news media is already filled with the opinions of those who, in the long run, matter little if at all. I’m skipping the psychoanalysis too. Don’t hand me all the utterances of the do-nothings who spend their days pointing out problems without making any effort at coming up with any solutions. You all know the ones I’m talking about, and I don’t mean everyone reading this, either — not by a long shot. I’m talking about all the TV and radio pundits who make their living by agitating and provoking people. I know the gunman in the Thousand Oaks, California mass shooting had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I suffer from PTSD myself, but the source of my disorder is from growing up in an abusive foster-care situation rather than from the battlefield. There are a lot of people who have PTSD, but none of the rest of us has arbitrarily decided to go out and mow down a dozen or more people. I can’t imagine doing such a thing myself. I find the very thought revolting.

All Life is Sacred

They can call whatever they do whatever they want. I call it ‘violently anti-social behavior’. And yet the majority of these agitators on radio and TV are church goers. From the vantage point of this (digital) pulpit, that’s what I’m seeing — that people today would rather fight each other than help each other. This adoption of such argumentative mindsets soon devolves into violence since intolerance devalues others to the point that simply killing a few is somehow OK. Taking a life — any life — just because one has deemed it to be necessary, is never OK. (acts of self-defense excluded) We have lost sight of the fact that life is sacred because it comes from sacred origins, whose name is the Almighty God.

We Can Hardly Imagine the Reward That Awaits Us