How My Thinking on Guns Has Shifted
Content note: This article discusses suicide and includes statistics about suicide methods.
I didn’t really grow up with guns. In my upbringing, they were mysterious and dangerous. My Dad was a police officer, so he had a pistol. For most of my youth he kept his Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special at home. He was a pilot for the police, so he never took it to work. Only once or twice did he succumb to my begging to take it down from the closet so I could have a look. When he did, he stressed the dangers of it, the safe handling of it and, above all, the threat of corporal punishment if I were ever to touch it without his permission. I never did.
The first time I shot a firearm I was 16. It was just a .22 rifle at a Calgary Study Weekend, a Christian youth event. After that, I never handled or fired a rifle until I met the young woman who would become my wife. On one of our first visits to Rose’s family farm, we went gopher hunting together, again with a .22 rifle. I was impressed with this woman who could shoot well.
Through her family connections, I eventually came into the possession of the aforementioned .22, as well as a .303 rifle, and a 12 gauge shotgun. When I was a missionary, I used these firearms for hunting around Fort Babine. They weren’t anything special – for example, the .303 had no scope and the 12 gauge had a plastic stock held together by duct tape. But I enjoyed my guns.
Near the end of my time as a missionary, our family spent some time in Fresno, California. One day I went to an indoor gun range. There I learned the thrill of shooting a Glock 9 mm handgun. Feeling the power of that piece in your hand radiating through your arm into your shoulder – that was a visceral awakening. Back in Canada, I’d never own a handgun, but I did go to another indoor range in West Edmonton Mall a few times.
When we moved to Australia, I had to give up my firearms. Since moving here, I once did some skeet shooting with a parishioner’s shotgun, but other than that, I haven’t shot in years. Getting firearms here has just too many hoops to jump through and, having been through all that in Canada, I’m tired of it. So just on that ground alone, I don’t have guns anymore. I’ve sometimes mentioned this fact to gun-loving friends and family. They know that I’ve long been resistant to gun laws.
Nearly 20 years ago, when I first started blogging, I wrote a small post about gun control:
Today’s Vancouver Sun has an editorial by SFU professor Gary Mauser. He points out that since the introduction of the registry of long rifles in Canada, murder rates have climbed. Sure, gun homicide numbers are down, but the total homicide rate has actually increased. The UK, which has much more stringent firearms legislation than Canada, has experienced an enormous surge in violent crimes and murders. In Ireland and Jamaica, firearms are virtually banned, yet since they did this in the 1970s, murder rates doubled. However, in the US where gun laws are more relaxed, the homicide rate fell 19% from 1991 to 2004.
I realize that there are more factors than guns involved in all these statistics and to pin the rise or fall of homicide rates on the availability of guns alone is simplistic and even fallacious. But to argue the other side, that highly restrictive gun laws make our streets safer — that, too, is fallacious. At the end of the day, Christians have the answer to this debate. The problem is not guns, the problem is people. Guns are not evil, people often are and that by nature. Guns are tools and like hammers, axes, and cars they can be used for good or evil. It seems to me that when we as Christians buy into the gun control rhetoric, we implicitly sell out not only on depravity, but also on the nature of what God has created.
In the main, I still hold those sentiments. But my thinking has shifted somewhat. My personal enthusiasm for firearms has withered.
Back in May, while on a trip to Canada, I bought an issue of Time magazine to read on the plane. Olive Rockeman wrote an article entitled, “Despair, and a gun in the house.” You can read it online here. This article challenged my thinking on this like nothing else has.
She describes the suicide of her father. He took his own life with a gun. She lays out some statistics:
- “The time between deciding to end one’s life and performing self-harm is, often, no more than 10 minutes…”
- Firearms are the most lethal suicide method, according to research from Stanford University.
- 58% of all gun-related deaths in the United States in 2023 were suicides.
- “Of suicide attempts using a gun, nearly 90% result in death, while only 4% of suicide attempts by other means are fatal.”
- “In states with the strongest firearm-safety laws…gun suicides fell over the past two decades, while states with the weakest laws experienced a 39% increase.”
I did some research into these statistics and they do seem to be legit – for example, the statistic about 58% of all gun-related deaths being suicides comes from a report published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. If I combine these numbers with a staggering mental health crisis, I can’t help but think twice about firearms.
Yes, guns are tools and can be used for good or evil. Yes, many people use them for good purposes. Yes, guns do save lives too. I acknowledge all those things. But when your life has been touched by suicide (as mine has), you can’t help but think, “What if…?” As Christians, we should aim to do everything we can to protect precious human lives. If there were a high bridge where people would frequently commit suicide, wouldn’t it make sense to put measures in place (like guard fences) to prevent this? Once you jump off a bridge, it’s like pulling the trigger, there’s no going back. Gravity is final. But if you can give someone a little more time to think, that can sometimes be enough to produce a different outcome.
So how has my thinking shifted? I’m personally done with owning firearms. I still have a technical interest in them. But whatever the laws may be here in Australia, whatever hoops there are to jump through, I’m done. On a legislative level, I’m now more in favour of some restrictions. Could it be good to not only have mental health background checks before purchasing firearms, but also have regular mental health check-ups for gun owners? Yes, that could be abused by totalitarian governments, so perhaps it’s not the solution. Apart from that, making gun ownership difficult (like here in Australia) is something I can now support. But above all, as a society, we need to address the complex root problem of why some people conclude (even briefly) that life isn’t worth living.
