Guns and Ideology

Driving in the Homewood area, I saw the following on a church billboard: “We either have to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools”. This is a prophetic summation of the human condition at the dawn of the 21st century. Societies throughout the world, including our own, are torn apart by class, religious and racial antagonisms, extreme disparities in wealth, food deprivation, drought, flooding, and deforestation.

There are those that decry rational solutions to these problems and think only in the wealth that would accrue to them by profiting from the pain and misery of humankind and the exploitation of the ecosystem that sustains all life. They are blinded by an ideological prism that recognizes unfettered markets and the maximization of profits as sacrosanct principles. Alien to their thought processes is the idea that we must live together as brothers and sisters and cooperate in building a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.

They have a social Darwinian outlook that pits class against class, individual against individual, in a macabre dance of violence and aggression. Their solutions to the problems facing humankind is militarism and guns. It is irrational to think that the greater access to combat style automatic weapons, increased clip capacity, and concealed carry will do anything but make class, racial, gender, and ethnic antagonisms more lethal and tear apart the ties that bind us.

The Will County Legislative and Judicial Committee should devote its time and energy to solving the real problems facing our community instead of debating a resolution which urges the State Legislature to pass an open-ended concealed weapons law. Let us transcend the warrior mentality and adopt a life preserving dictum espoused by Jesus that encompassed the sanctity of all living things.

Don T.