Guns in America: Looking at the Numbers

These are those who were enrolled, whom Moses and Aaron enrolled with the help of the leaders of Israel, twelve men, each representing his ancestral house. So the whole number of the Israelites, by their ancestral houses, from twenty years old and upward, everyone able to go to war in Israel—their whole number was six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty. 
Numbers 1:44-46

I love numbers.

From an early age, part of my love of baseball was a love of the numbers. Baseball, more than any other sport, is obsessed with numbers. We don’t just look at the big numbers like batting averages and winning percentages. We look at the numbers inside the numbers: batting average with men on base, or with two strikes, or on the first pitch. We don’t just count strikeouts, we count called strikes and swinging strikes. It’s endless and it’s wonderful.

As a Methodist minister I am required to submit a statistical report every year. We count everything: worship attendance, Sunday School enrollment, Sunday School teachers and Sunday School attendance, numbers of small groups, attendance at small groups, youth groups and youth group leaders, mission groups, Bible studies, and outreach ministries. I confess that I don’t love the statistical reports. The truth is, I hate them. But I still love numbers.

Recently, though, I have been looking at some other numbers that I don’t love at all. There are about 300,000,000 guns in the United States; almost one for every man, woman and child. And the numbers keep increasing. After the Newtown shootings, Americans bought more guns and more ammunition.

According to the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, about 5.5 million new firearms were manufactured in the United States and 95% of them were sold in the United State. In addition, approximately 3.3 million guns were imported. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) ran 16.5 million background checks for gun purchases and only about 78,000 were turned down. Because we have no federal (or state) gun registry, we have no idea whether or not the folks who were turned down already had guns at home. 

Looking at the number of guns and the number of gun sales, and listening to the anecdotes supplied by the NRA about young moms buying guns and taking lessons in how to use them, it seems like the number of Americans owning firearms is continuing to increase, but new polling data says that’s not the whole story. The National Rifle Association has bullied congress into passing laws that make it almost impossible to keep any records at all, so many of the numbers are estimates. 

According to the new polls, it looks like we have two trends going in opposite directions. For the last four decades the number of American households with guns has been steadily declining, while the total number of guns has gone up. In 1973 about 53% of American households had guns. Recently, that number has declined to about 33%. Among younger people, the decline in gun ownership is even more pronounced. 

There are more guns, but fewer gun owners. Fewer people have more guns. If the numbers are accurate, then the average gun owner had about ten weapons. 

We’ll pause for a moment to digest that last bit of data. 

The idea that a small number of people are buying more and more guns is a little scary, but the long term implications are positive. Eventually, we will be able to institute reasonable gun control laws and reduce the number of gun related deaths. If we can’t be like England, maybe we can be like Australia. 

In the meantime, I find myself pondering another number. There are about five million members in the NRA. I am amazed that such a small group can wield such incredible political power. And they are maintaining their influence while taking positions that are increasingly radical. Once they were in favor of universal background checks and now they are against them. They have even resisted preventing people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns. 

 
The NRA has fewer members than the United Methodist Church in the United States. Admittedly, the numbers are not directly comparable. In the UMC families often have more than one member. In the NRA it’s more likely to be one member per family. And of course, there is some overlap of people who belong to both the UMC and the NRA. But still. 

Everyone is afraid of the NRA. No one is afraid of the United Methodist Church. Part of that is because the NRA has one issue while we have many. And part of it is because the NRA is focused almost exclusively on public policy while we have a much broader range of concerns.

But still. Part of the problem is that we are not nearly as passionate about social justice, or economic inequality, or hungry children, or health care, as the NRA is about guns.

We Are Past the Tipping Point

“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 
Mark 16:6-7 

As I read the story about the Rev. Dr. Thomas Ogletree, a retired United Methodist clergy person and former dean of Yale Divinity School facing a church trial and possible censure for officiating at the wedding of his gay son, the sound in my head was of that Easter hymn that Christians have sung for more than 300 years., “The Strife Is O’er, the Battle Done.”

The strife is o’er, the battle done,
the victory of life is won;
the song of triumph has begun: 

Alleluia!

The powers of death have done their worst,
but Christ their legions have dispersed;
let shouts of holy joy outburst: 

Alleluia! 

It’s over. We may still be fighting the battles on this one in the United Methodist Church. And the arguments will persist. But it’s over.

Last week Rhode Island voted for marriage equality. We are the last New England state to embrace same sex marriage, so it’s about time. But we are also the most heavily Roman Catholic state in the country. And the legislature voted overwhelmingly in favor of marriage equality in spite of strong opposition from Bishop Thomas Tobin and the Roman Catholic Diocese.

We are beyond the tipping point. It’s over.

For United Methodists, the more critical issue is how we will manage the inevitable change. We need an exit strategy from a position we should never have taken. Our problem is not just that we unwisely declared homosexuality to be “incompatible with Christian teaching” forty years ago, at the same time as the medical people were declaring that homosexuality was not a mental illness. We compounded a bad decision on ethics with an even worse decision on church policy.

In our United Methodist Discipline we declare ourselves to be in favor of lots of wonderful stuff, like environmental stewardship and gun control and economic justice. We are against war and against capital punishment. But in all of those other cases (and many more) there are no penalties for clergy or others who disagree and act on their disagreement. A United Methodist pastor can bless a nuclear submarine without fear of official censure, but he or she cannot celebrate a same sex wedding.

In the New York Times article it notes that the clergy persons who brought the complaint against Dr. Ogletree belong to the “Good News” movement, which the Times calls a “tranditionalist” United Methodist group. They are “tradionalists,” but traditionalism is not our United Methodist tradition. Our tradition is to be what is now called “progressive” Christians. Our tradition is to be forward thinking and forward looking and forward moving.

My guess is that at our next General Conference in 2016 the Discipline will be revised to remove the negative characterization of homosexuality and endorse full civil rights for our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers. My hope is that we will do better than that; that we will focus on the future rather than the past.

Christ is not to be found buried in the bitterness and bigotry of the past. He is risen as he said. And he goes ahead of us. He is always calling us into the future. Our task is just to follow.

Unemployment and the Economics of Jesus

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” 
Matthew 20:1-16

I’m guessing that the story of the Laborers and the Vineyard is not on anyone’s short list of favorite parables. More than likely, it is among those we most dislike. We can mumble out the familiar ending about the last being first and pretend that we like it because we think that we ought to like it, but the truth is that we don’t like it.

We believe that the folks who worked the longest and the hardest should get the most money. We value hard work and should value hard work.

In general, the Bible values hard work, but Jesus is making a very different counter-cultural point here. Note the conversation with the last group of workers, those still unemployed in the late afternoon:

“And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ 7They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’”

The landowner asks the obvious question. “Why are you idle?” And by implication, “what’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to work? Are you lazy?” The answer given to the landowner and to us is a complete explanation of the situation: “We aren’t working because no one has hired us.” This is not a moral failing on the part of the unemployed. They aren’t lazy or stupid. They are idle because no one has hired them. It is just that simple. And at the end of the day, they get a day’s wage because that’s what they need to support their families.

In his commentary on this parable, William Barclay says that it sets forth two great truths:
1. Every man has [person] a right to a job
2. Every man [person] has a right to a living wage.

Writing in the middle of the last century, Barclay believed that those “two great truths” would be recognized by most thinking people. I am not sure that is true today.

In the middle of the last century, when William Barclay wrote his commentaries, the pain of a recession was absorbed in three ways: lost profits, lost productivity and lost jobs. Today we still have those three categories of impact, but approximately two-thirds of the losses are absorbed in unemployment.

Half a century ago, some workers were let go, and those who remained typically did less work, resulting in less productivity and lower profits. Today, the workers who remain find themselves doing more work to make up for those who were laid off. And workers have responded by “doing more with less” and increasing productivity. This increased productivity has not resulted in higher wages, but in higher profits.

Economists will tell us that corporations have learned to manage the downturns more efficiently. But at least part of it is because we no longer have a consensus that people have a right to work and a right to a living wage.

Today we have 12 million unemployed people who are actively looking for work. That does not count the people who have given up. Within those numbers is an even more troubling statistic: 4.6 million people have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and even worse, two-thirds of them have been out of work for more than a year.

We are creating a group of long-term unemployed people whose lack of employment renders them unemployable. They are unemployable, not because they lack skills or because they are unwilling. They are unemployable because employers do not want to hire them.

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote about an experiment conducted by William Dickens and Rand Ghavad of Northeastern University. They sent out “résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.” Krugman’s conclusion is that we are creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.

In the economics of Jesus, everyone has a right to a job and a living wage. If we believe that, then we can begin to create a consensus to develop the policies and programs to achieve that end. This is not impossible. It is not the inevitable result of market cycles. It is a choice.

Their Blood Cries Out from the Ground

When they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!” 
Genesis 4:8-10 

The images of the Boston Marathon bombing are everywhere. But maybe most of all, they are inside of our heads. I am guessing that everyone reading this can stop and call to mind the images from Monday. The pictures of the explosion. The wounded being taken to hospitals. The man holding tight to another man’s severed artery. And the pictures of those who died.

At Yankee Stadium they played “Sweet Caroline” as a tribute to the people in Boston. On The Daily Show Jon Stewart spoke about the rivalry between New York and Boston, and he said that in times like this we are reminded that it is “a sibling rivalry.” And later this morning, President Obama will lead a healing service for the people of Boston.

A small army of investigators is hard at work, carefully examining video tapes and picture, interviewing witnesses, and piecing together the evidence that will lead them to find the killer. No stone will be left unturned. No expense will be spared.

In the meantime . . . If the hours and days since the marathon have been average days in America, then there have been nearly 100 gun murders since the bombs exploded, and there have been nearly 500 people wounded by guns. And over 150 people have used a gun to commit suicide.

In their books on early Christianity, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg draw a sharp contrast between the Roman Empire and the Christian vision of the Kingdom of God. The Roman Empire, and every empire, is characterized by what they call “the normalcy of violence.” The Kingdom of God presents a radically different alternative based on non-violence and peace through justice.

In the United States we are so accustomed to gun violence that most of the time it seems “normal” to us. We are willing to stand in line at airports and have our clothing and baggage searched in order to prevent the violence of “terrorism.” But we are unwilling to cause even a small inconvenience in order to reduce the routine terrorism of gun violence.

Yesterday, with the images of Boston still playing in our minds, we watched the United States Senate fail to adopt a measure to provide universal background checks for gun sales. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Gabrielle Giffords wrote:

“Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.”

And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”

Social Insecurity

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 
Exodus 20:12

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
James 1:27

Conventional wisdom says that if we are serious about reducing the deficit, then we will have to do something to curb “entitlements.” And in this context the entitlements under review are Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The obvious question is why we are so concerned about deficit reduction when the immediate need is for jobs and almost everyone agrees that cutting government spending will slow the recovery (or send us back into recession) and we can see that austerity has failed all over Europe. But we will leave that for another time.

Medicare and Medicaid belong in a separate discussion that focuses on health care costs. But let’s look at Social Security.

First, Social Security is not adding to the deficit. Right now, Social Security has a surplus and that surplus is being used to buy government bonds which are funding the deficit. If we do nothing, Social Security will eventually become a problem. In 2033, if we do nothing, Social Security will have to reduce payments by 25%. That projected shortfall, and the related assumption that Congress will appropriate funds from the Federal Budget to prevent a reduction in benefits, is what drives the idea that Social Security is part of the debt problem.

Correcting the problem is not that difficult. If we eliminated the cap on wages subject to Social Security, the fund would be solvent for the next seventy-five years. In other posts I have written about how the incomes of the richest Americans have grown much faster than everyone else’s. In terms of Social Security, that means that a larger percentage of total wages is not taxed for Social Security. Even if we did not eliminate the cap, we could still reduce the shortfall substantially by adjusting the cap on wages.

Second, we should be thinking about ways to expand Social Security, rather than ways to shrink it. Social Security is our most successful domestic program. It has dramatically reduced poverty among our elderly. Theoretically, Social Security is one leg of a three-legged stool that makes up American retirement accounts. The other legs are employer sponsored pension programs and individual retirement accounts. But the non-governmental legs are much weaker than they once were. Fewer corporations are offering pension plans, and individual accounts have been hard hit by the Great Recession. Fewer than half of households ages 55-64 have any retirement savings. And fewer than half of those that do have savings have more than $120,000.

The majority of retirees have incomes of less than $32,600 per year and receive approximately two-thirds of all their income from Social Security. And the average benefit is just $1,265 per month. Eighty percent of all seniors have incomes below $57,600 per year and receive, on average, half of their incomes from Social Security. Only the top 20% or seniors do not count Social Security as their largest income source, and that’s because most of them are still working.

Expanding Social Security sounds like crazy talk if you believe that the current budget discussions in Washington are sane. But we need to think hard about what sort of living conditions we imagine for future retirees. Most of the talk about “reforming” Social Security really means reducing benefits, either by increasing the retirement age or by decreasing the amount paid out. And that will translate into more seniors living near or below the poverty line.

We need to think seriously about how we can make Social Security into a reasonable replacement for disappearing corporate pensions. That will require increasing the payroll tax on almost everyone, and it’s hard to imagine our current leadership taking that on. But the alternative is a future in which the gaps between rich and poor increase as we age and are much greater in retirement.

Bill O'Reilly, Dan Savage, and Bible Thumpers

For this reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love—and I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful both to you and to me. I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. 
Philemon 1:8-12 

Recently on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bill O’Reilly commented that in the debate over marriage equality, the strong arguments were all on the side of same sex marriage. They just want to be treated like everyone else in American, he said. “That’s a strong argument.” By contrast, he noted that all the opponents can do is “thump their Bibles.” And that, he opined, is not a good argument.

Not that long ago, Bill O’Reilly was criticizing those who had shifted toward supporting equal marriage for what he termed “pandering” to public opinion. And he mocked those who said that their perspectives were “evolving.” His own shift, if that is what it is, has been much more abrupt. And it represents a seismic shift in the argument.

The public sentiment in favor of equal marriage is growing at an amazing rate. And that is a very good thing.

But what is not a good thing is that the Bible has been “thumped” from both sides.

Opponents misuse it, and supporters ignore it or denigrate it.

A friend posted a quotation from Dan Savage that is indicative of how the Bible has been dismissed in the debate. Addressing a high school group in Washington State, Savage declared:

“The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn't say, 'Christians don't own people.' Paul talks about how Christians own people.... the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong: slavery. What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? One hundred percent."

In spite of the fact that the Bible does not condemn slavery, at least not consistently, and there are many more verses condoning slavery than there are condemning it, we need to put that in historical perspective. Nearly two millennia after the last biblical writer wrote the last verse in the Bible, the framers of our constitution “got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong.” If Jefferson and his colleagues were wrong two hundred years ago, it’s not surprising that Paul was wrong two thousand years ago. We should also note that the “slaves” in Paul’s time were more like indentured servants than the slaves kept by the Founders.

But wait, there’s more.

Paul, like Jesus, was a radical egalitarian. In his letter to Philemon, he is appealing for the release of Onesimus. He hopes that Philemon will do this, out of a sense of Christian faith, rather than under compulsion, because he feels Paul’s appeal as a command. But one way or the other, he wants Onesimus freed and embraced as “a brother.” Paul understand the early Christian church to be an egalitarian community, and a model for what the whole world will eventually become when the Kingdom of God is realized “on earth as it is in heaven.”

John Wesley, who was deeply committed to biblical Christianity, was a life-long opponent of slavery. Wesley knew the many verses that condoned slavery, but he also saw that the whole thrust of the Bible, from the Exodus to Paul’s letters, was toward freedom and liberation.

While the founders were enshrining slavery in the Constitution, Wesley was condemning it. In his last letter, written to William Wilberforce, he writes: “O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”

Wesley did not oppose slavery in spite of his faith, but because of it. In the same way, we cannot develop an authentically Christian perspective on equal marriage by appealing to a few scattered verses of Scripture. We need to look for the broad themes and principles.

How Much Is Too Much?

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames. ’But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. 
Luke 16:19-25

One of the things the Bible is very clear about is that a large gap between poor people and rich people is not a good thing. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, recalling the story of Manna in the desert, the goal is a society in which “the one who had more did not have too much, and the one who had less did not have too little.” In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus is telling a story that is not meant to be taken literally, but he places responsibility on the rich man to do something about the divide between those who have nothing and those who are able to dress well and feast “sumptuously every day.”

But the Bible does not give much guidance on what sort of income gap is acceptable.

Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School recently published an interesting study, asking a random sample of 5,500 Americans which of three possible patterns of wealth distribution would be best for the country.

In one pattern, the wealth was divided equally. The bottom fifth had 20% of the wealth, as did the top fifth, and each of the three fifths in between.

Another pattern, represented the current situation in the United States, where the bottom fifth has just .1% of the wealth (one tenth of a percent), and the top fifth has 84%.

The third pattern showed the income distribution in Sweden, where the bottom fifth has 11% of the wealth, and the top fifth has 36%.

Of course, the participants were not told that two of the distributions represented real countries, and they were not told that one was the United States and the other was Sweden. Without knowing what the countries were, over 90% preferred the pattern in Sweden to the pattern in the United States. And this was true of Democrats and Republicans, Conservatives and Liberals. It was also true of people in every income group, from the bottom to the top. With small differences among the groups, almost everyone wanted to live in a country where the wealth is more evenly divided.

Ariely and Norton asked two more important questions.

They asked participants what they believed the wealth distribution in the United States was right now. On average, they believed that the top fifth had 59% of the wealth.

And they asked participants how much the top fifth should have, and on average they responded that the top fifth should have just 32% of the wealth. On average they believed that the poorest fifth should have 11% of the wealth.

In other words, the average American thinks that the richest Americans should have much less and the poorest Americans should have much more. And the average American would rather live in Sweden in terms of income distribution, but believes that even there the gap is too much.

The study also revealed (no big surprise) that Conservatives and Liberals have very different ideas about what we should do in order to move toward a more equitable distribution. But at least we agree on the goal. I count that as a win for the Jesus and Paul and the Hebrew prophets.