Rev. McKinley L. Sims, M.Div.

The most recent mass shooting in Parkland, FL struck me in two distinct and horrifying ways. The first is that a dear friend from college sent out an email to everyone who meant something to him. He’s a Marjory Stoneman Douglass alumni, and he grew up around the corner from the school in Parkland. He was emotionally wrecked, and he just wanted to reach out and hug everyone he could. It was the first time I’ve had a more personal connection to a horrific shooting like this.

The second thing that struck me was how quickly I felt a pull to shut down and forget about the violence, to not emotionally engage with the hard stuff. I was willing to simply say, “Well, that’s awful,” and go about my day. I was ready to move on, almost immediately.

That feeling terrifies me.

It also makes me angrier than I’ve been in a long time. So now, I’m furious. I’m writing this to process my own grief and to provide some sense of context for folks who are looking for a new piece of information to throw into the inevitable social media debates that don’t seem to go anywhere. Lather, rinse, repeat. The definition of insanity is what we’re doing with gun violence discourse in this country….and I know insanity. I work in a psych ward.

So let me try to explain where people like me are coming from in this world. For folks raised in places like conservative West Texas, there’s a lot disconnect between us and the other parts of the country, the bluer/more liberal parts.

1. First off, you need to know what it’s like to be from West Texas. We’re raised to be independent and self sufficient. That’s part of the ethos, it’s part of our culture, and it’s part of our religion. You can’t separate these very easily. For the vast majority of folks in West Texas and other conservative parts of this country, the entanglement of our politics, culture, and religion mean everything. They’re one in the same. It’s what we in the Church call a Trinitarian relationship. It’s nearly impossible to separate the way the majority of white folks in red states feel about guns or abortion or states rights without also talking about how we feel about baptism and gospel music and Texas itself.
2. West Texas thrives on the cotton industry, football, and country music. This makes it a semi-autonomous nation economically, and it handled the shocks of the Great Recession fairly well. It also doesn’t have a great relationship with the urban centers of “power” in Texas, because we’re so far from Dallas, Houston, and Austin. We’re proud of our independence, and that colonizer/pioneer spirit is what allowed white folks who moved west from Ft. Worth into the Comanche desert of the South Plains to survive and displace the Native folks who lived here before us.
3. President Obama once said of Central Pennsylvania that, “they cling to their guns and religion.” He wasn’t wrong, but he might not have known how right he was. Remember that our culture, our politics, and our religions are all enmeshed, so clinging to them is a symptom of reaction to a deep seated fear and insecurity about the rest of the world. If you don’t have a lot of economic, political, or cultural power to influence the rest of the nation (like the East Coast and West Coast do), you have to take what you can get. If the rest of the nation doesn’t seem to value what you do, if the rest of the nation values technology and innovation and secular institutions…..you might feel like your culture, politics, and religion is not valued.
4. We’ve seen what happened to the Comanche way of life when it was not valued or protected by the dominant cultural forces. It disappears. We can see that happening and we react out of fear…we cling to our guns and religion. We cling to our culture out of fear that it might not be valued enough to hang around. We conserve.
5. Guns allowed us to survive in the South Plains. Guns are a part of culture that is not tied just to hunting or military service or anything else. Guns and knives and all kinds of weapons are tied into who we are as a people, as a sub-culture. I am a gun owner because my Grandfather was a gun owner. I learned to shoot as soon as I could walk. I’m not exaggerating. My fondest memories of my Grandad, the man who raised me, involve pickup trucks and guns. They tie me to him, even fifteen years after he passed away. If you want to know how important guns are to our culture, consider that my Grandad’s handwritten will is incredibly vague about the division of his land and mineral rights to the family homestead we’ve inhabited for 100 years…..but he divvied up his guns to his three grandsons by spelling out the make, model, serial number, and list of needed repairs on each weapon.
6. Our guns are not weapons. They’re memories for us. They’re part of who we are. We can’t separate them out, like maybe you can.

So when something like the Parkland gun massacre occur, we get scared. We get defensive. We hear the rest of the nation calling us ignorant, rednecks, dumb hicks, etc. And we react badly. We conserve.

You might say, “but I’m not attacking your religion or your culture, just the violence from guns!”

Guns are our religion. Conservative politics is our religion. Country music is our religion. They’re all enmeshed. And when we feel attacked by the dominant culture on one specific part of that enmeshed culture, we react like our entire way of life is being attacked…because to us, it is. We can’t separate them, so we don’t understand how you can. It literally doesn’t make sense to us. We can’t imagine separating those parts of our lives- we’re Trinitarian in that way.

So here’s the rub….

The number one reason why white folks/conservative folks/West Texan folks get so uptight about “gun control” is not because we’re worried about the government taking over. It’s not because we’re paranoid hicks and we demand the right to hunt with any firearm we can get our hands on. And it’s not because we’re firm defenders of the Constitution.

It’s because guns are fun to shoot.

That’s the dirty secret that we try to shy away from. We like them. They’re fun. They give you a rush, like driving a big pickup truck really fast or jumping into a river. They’re fun.

They’re fun.

That’s what it’s about. We can couch it however we like to, but the arguments are a smokescreen to hide behind the fact that they’re fun. And they are fun. They’re fun to shoot. They’re fun to look at, fun to clean, fun to use. It’s fun to feel that strong and powerful. It’s fun to have that power in your hands. It makes you feel invincible.

But here’s another dirty secret: that power is a lie. Guns will lie to you about who and what they are.

So here are some things you can say to us in these seemingly endless debates that we might not have though about. It might be a way to hear a story and try something new.

Something you can say to us is this: Aren’t you pro-life? Guns are not pro-life.

We love to talk about being pro-life. Guns are not pro-life. Guns are designed to take life. Guns were literally invented to take life. The first rule of being with my Grandad was to never point a gun at anyone and to always treat it like it was loaded and capable of taking life. Never point a gun at someone else.

Something else you can say to us is this: Which of your guns is most meaningful to you? Why?

Like I said. Memories. Storytelling. Culture. We don’t see guns the same way you see them.  Hear the story and share a story about what’s meaningful to you.

Something else you can say to us is this: Why do you need a gun if you have God?

Because this is the last and biggest point. If we were really secure in our faith, our culture, and our politics…we wouldn’t need guns. We’re actually really scared the world is passing us by, and we don’t know how to relate to people who are different than us. We don’t know how to be connected to people who are really different than us, because we haven’t had a lot of practice. And then we we did meet people who were different, they seemed so much smarter and richer and more valued by society than us.

So we Conserve. We Cling. We React.

But if we were really brave, we wouldn’t need guns….because we’d have God. Our arguments about protection and safety and power and control wouldn’t matter….because we’d have God. Christianity is about the infinite power of God to protect those who believe. The atonement of Jesus Christ is supposed to provide assurance of life for all those who profess faith.

So why do we need guns?

Because when our culture got all enmeshed with our politics and our religion, we replaced God with Guns.

I need you to read that again: We replaced God with Guns.

Guns literally became our religion, our center of worship. They were the thing we built our lives around, along with football, cotton, and country western music. They became our idols, our Golden Calves.

So when you bring facts and data to the debate about gun control, know that we literally can’t hear what you’re saying. We can’t comprehend facts because we’re not having a debate about logic or science or things that require facts…we’re having an argument about whether our Religion matters enough to survive. Whether our Culture will survive.

And we worry that any concession will lead to us being the Comanche. We did it to them, and you can do it to us.

Unless we Conserve. Cling. React.

I don’t have any solutions, or big answers. I just know that the debate is meaningless if we don’t reconcile the fact that we’re having two different debates. One side is presenting arguments that don’t make sense, because the other side literally doesn’t use sense to live out their culture. We live by faith.

So try having this debate in person, over a meal, and try telling stories. And then try asking for us to live into our best selves by leaning into what we say we believe.

We believe in courage. We believe in love. We believe in not quitting when it gets hard.

Hold us to these things, and we might just come around to the fact that while shooting AR-15s is really fun, so is getting to play games with your kids who don’t have to worry about getting shot by a semi-automatic, high capacity rifle.

Life is more important than one fun activity, and we’re selfish and cowardly if we claim otherwise. Our culture is rich and diverse and meaningful, and it will survive “gun control.”

We just need to be braver and let go of some things so that we can conserve, cling, and react to what really matters.

You.

Hold us to it.