More Guns

NPH flipped the channel away from the Royals game this afternoon to find a live action local news break about a shooting at a local mall. It's the mall we drive right past nearly every single day, and the locale of our local Target store. It's where we got our cell phone. It's where the wife meets with a group of colleagues to study for the medical board exams. It's where NPH bought a pair of sandals not three weeks ago.

Hardly anything is known about it at this point, since it only happened about 45 minutes ago.

If the cover of the most recent Presbyterian Outlook wasn't unsettling enough already, it looks even worse now. Is the church somehow complicit in our culture's media narrative about guns?

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Letter to The Editor

NPH had a letter to the editor published in the local paper on Tuesday, April 24th (scroll down to "OK to rush to judgment).

What started as an unsolicited and not-a-little self righteous "guest editorial" ended up being a 200 word letter. You take what you can get, and hopefully you don't embarrass yourself.

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Steve(gis) and Kathy (Lee)

Here's the link to the Steve and Kathy Show, the show for which we did a man-on-the-street interview earlier this week.

Seriously, the thought that NPH would appear on a video montage of this show is absolutely mortifying. Click "This Week's Episode" to see what we mean.

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Not Exactly Jay Leno

NPH and his wife took an innocent jaunt for cheesecake this evening that ended with NPH mistaking Pope Benedict for Jack Kavorkian in front of a television camera.

Lots of people in blue button up shirts and a couple of cameramen standing on a Plaza street corner looked like the perfect weeknight diversion. As we walked by, one of the blue shirts asked us if we'd like to answer some questions for a new TV show. NPH could see what was going on, as a short, ruddy white guy with a crop cut showed pictures of political figures in an obvious hope for a display of ignorance. But it looked kinda fun, so we said, "Sure. We'll go on TV and be made a fool of."

Plus, we had 30 minutes to kill before American Idol.

We were given a waiver to sign, giving the show permission to use our image and name. We signed it mindlessly, asking as we did such basic questions as, "So are you guys a locally produced show? Where else has your show been on? When is it starting?" Yeah, the blue shirt said, it's locally produced, and, yeah, it's been on in some other cities, and it starts here in about a month. Then she gave us a flyer with info about when the show airs and on what channel. Then we looked at the flyer.

Then it got interesting.

There in our hand was a flyer with "World Revival Church" and a cheesy picture of the two people standing in front of me interviewing people (cheesy like standing back-to-back cheesy). Inside were details about worship service times and the church's pastoral staff, all of whom were white men with titles like, "Overseer of Uprising Music" and "Associate Pastor of Evangelism and Intercessory Prayer."

The whole thing came into focus pretty clearly after that. What we were dealing with was a conservative church TV production that was seeking to illustrate the average American's ignorance of politics. It was good to know that going in.

Here's what Steve asked your favorite third person-referring blogger:

• What is a liberal? What is a conservative?
• What do the words IRS stand for?
• What does Congress do?

Then he showed us a series of pictures and asked us to identify the people in them. Laura Bush, Harry Reid, Condoleeza Rice ("Should she run for President?"), Tony Snow, and a white-haired man with deep set eyes who we couldn't quite recognize. So we asked, "Is that Jack Kavorkian?"

If they were looking for ignorant Americana, NPH gave them all they could handle.

We nervously looked to the wife, who was desperately mouthing "It's The Pope!" from a few feet away. But the damage was done. We had already been made a pawn of the religious right.

In reality, the wife has repeatedly assured us that we actually smacked ol' Steve down, easily recognizing every other picture. She even said it was sexy. Take that Steve.

And please don't show the video of NPH.

Really. Please.

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A Hunch

NPH has a hunch that the mass shooting that happened on Monday is of a type. It's a type of violent crime that is unique in its own right and is quite distinct from most other types of violent crime involving guns. It gets carried out by an individual or a small group who are motivated by an interior sense of isolation and a grievance against the collective culture. They are not "criminals" in the classic sense, and so gun-control measures aimed at keeping them out of the hands of criminals won't stop them (the VT shooter passed the required background check to purchase his gun).

Secondly, and more to the policy point, they aren't gun buyers or gun owners. They buy their guns to be used once. They're like the 9/11 hijackers in that they don't need to learn how to land. NPH mentions this because gun-control measures always come up against that mass of gun owners who defend their right to bear arms. We need to somehow distinguish, legislatively, between the average gun-owner and the person who's only got one use for it.

How do we do that? Surely it can be done, and we look forward to learning how.

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Insights from The Internet: Smaller Is Better?

Church of the Customer links to a whitepaper today that says that, in the world of online communities, the fewer the participants the greater the contribution of those participants. Communispace, a company that specializes in creating online communities for companies around certain products, studied 66 different private online communities (totaling over 26,000 participants) and found that roughly 86 % of people who logged on to online communities with an average size of 300-500 participants contributed content to the site.

So the smaller the community, the more its member actually participate in it.

NPH wants to pursue this insight into the emerging online space a little bit. What might this say to the "declining" brick-and-mortar space of the small church? Most people in small churches would probably agree that there's a relationship between the intimacy of a community and its activism; when you know most of the people in your church by name, you're more likely to join with them to get stuff done. Paid staff can't be relied on to do as much as in a "large" church, so the members themselves contribute a lot of content, to put it one way.

But what more is there here? What actually constitutes "small" in the world of churches? In the world of online communities small is 300-500 members, which is no doubt a "large" church.

And what does "contributing content" look like in a congregation? Volunteering? Leading worship? Teaching a Bible study? Bringing a casserole to the pot luck?

There's a good conversation to be had here, one that lifts up the virtue of smallness when it comes to the church's task of cultivating community.

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Settle Down?

NPH wants to relatavise the value of "calm" and "objectivity" in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings on Monday. Starting with a White House spokesperson, then proceeding to Senate Majority Leader Reid, and now fully permeating the blogosphere, the assertion that the country needs to avoid a rush to judgment and a fresh battle on gun control makes NPH a little sick.

Consider this quote from the uber-blogger, Atrios: " if people want to kill people and don't care if they get killed or caught they're going to kill people."

Yes, but the elephant in the middle of the university is that, without the easily availability of firearms, those people aren't going to be able to kill people as easily. NPH wonders if he's the only one who thinks the existence of the debate itself points to the need for an un-objective solution. I mean, how many times does a public have to endure the same kind of tragedy before it stops treating the nature of that tragedy as a debating point and instead FIXES THE DAMNED PROBLEM.

Blacksburgh, Columbine, Nickel Mines, Paducah . . .

The list goes on and on, and it's only going to grow. And that despite the assertion of another blogger that mass killings, given the availability of weaponry in this country, are "blissfully rare." Sorry? What was that? Blissfully rare? Forget for a moment the leap required to place "mass killing" and "blissful" in the same sentence and try to answer the question the assertion begs: how often would these incidents have to happen for it to be an actual problem? This is the second one in about six months.

And do we need to observe that, for the friends and relatives of those dead and for those survivors who leapt from windows and played dead, it's not "rare" at all. It will recur for them every day for the rest of their life.

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people." What other industry, what other lobby, what other interest would be allowed to simply explain away the cause of killing so glibly without some kind of public outcry or legislative avalanche? What other product has to defend itself against the connection between itself and lots and lots of killing?

Can anyone imagine the auto industry suggesting that since, "cars don't kill people; people kill people," everybody ought to be legally allowed to drive a car, regardless of age?

NPH thinks that to posture for "objectivity" and "cool heads" right now is stupid, stupid, stupid. Further, we suspect that it's self-interested (every politician knows that gun control is a no-win election issue). How would the FAA appear if it made such appeals in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? We didn't hear anybody calling for "cool heads" as the airport security protocol got completely overhauled.

Here's where our rambling lands: now is the time to act. In the wake of tragedy, when emotions are at their most raw, when we are most horrified, is the time to attack the horror. Trust the rage. Trust the disgust. That reaction is the most reliable guide in deciding how to fix this. Once cooler heads prevail, then the people who died are simply names on a list and the country simply shrugs its shoulders--until the next time.

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