If you care about the victims of gun violence like we have seen in #Uvalde, #Buffalo, #LagunaWoods, #Dallas, etc. then you need to push for policy change. The fact that this many people have access to guns (there are more guns than people in the US) tells a lot about who we are.
The standard responses people give about how guns aren’t the problem & how individual rights will be threatened is tragic.
My heart breaks for the families that will be left without their loved ones because we continue to fail to keep deadly weapons away from deadly people.
It’s one thing to lament a deranged person who murdered people (including children, a teacher, and his own grandmother). It’s another thing to stand by and do nothing to promote change so deranged people can’t get easy access to guns. We need policy changes.
We need #GunControlNow. No more shootings should be tolerated because people think they need to prepare for World War 3 or some government take over.
Today, I think about what one of my Taiwanese international graduate students once shared with me. She said in a class, the professor asked what Christian freedom meant to them.
She always saw Christian freedom as living in radical self-sacrificing obedience to Jesus.
However…
To the question about what Christian freedom meant, her “American” classmates responded by saying Christian freedom was the freedom to do whatever they wanted because Jesus died for their freedom.
This shocked her profoundly.
This idolatry of freedom fuels the idolatry of guns.
The insistence on personal rights and freedom can be found nowhere in Scripture. At best, what we are called to do is fight for conditions that lead to the flourishing of others. What’s remarkable is that the obsession of personal rights & freedoms has been conflated with faith.
Notice which Christians say we need gun reform. Notice which ones simply say they grieve what happened in #Uvalde, #Buffalo, #LagunaWoods, etc. The ones who simply say they lament are the ones who walk by the person on the side of the road that the Samaritan man helped.
The Christian leaders who have congregations/constituencies where political idolatry and an idolatry of the second amendment have been allowed to flourish will say nothing about the need for #GunControlNow. #Uvalde should never have happened.
You cannot obey the second commandment to love your neighbor as the Bible defines neighbor and idolatrously defend the second amendment and resist gun reform.
Let's be clear, no one wants to get rid of or replace people who are racialized as white. We simply want all people to live justly, mercifully, and humbly. The only way to do that in a racialized society is to dismantle white supremacy. White supremacy is what we want to replace.
The only people who believe that people of color want to get rid of "white people" are those who have bought into or are spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories OR those who are committed to white supremacy itself.
We want all people to live in just conditions harmoniously.
If you believe in some "replacement theory," know that it is driven by white supremacists who want to maintain a white supremacist structure, and believe in the superiority of whiteness. The replacement theory is purely fear mongering to rile up a political base against equality.
The Model Minority Myth, honorary whiteness, white adjacency, and other stereotypes that are imposed on Asian Americans and then bought into by Asian Americans need to be interrogated, uprooted, and obliterated.
It is noteworthy that he contrasts East Asians. Somehow, the 18 year old white supremacist had enough nuanced thinking to carve out East Asians from the entire Asian diaspora.
This means, in the social imagination & his own experience, that East Asians were model minorities.
To fellow East Asians, ask yourself if you are the minority that this white supremacist would applaud. In fact, all people should ask if they are the type of person this killer would want to see ruling the world with him. Would your presence disrupt his thinking and beliefs?
Pray for the parents and loved ones of those who will not be spending their evenings and the rest of their days with their loved ones because someone was indoctrinated to believe that white people are being replaced and are under threat in the US.
What we saw in #Buffalo is a part of the same strain of white supremacist entitlement that led to the shootings in a Black church in Charleston, Synagogue in Pittsburg, Walmart in El Paso, a Sikh Gudwara in Wisconsin, etc.
It’s an evil that needs to be worked out of our society.