Christian faith and capital punishment

I wrote this in 1999 on the occasion of Tennessee about to commit a convict to death for the first time since 1960. 

John 8:3‑11

3          The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group

4          and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.

5          In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

6          They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.

7          When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”

8          Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9          At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.

10        Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11        “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

 Robert Glen Coe is on death row at the Tennessee State Penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of eight-year-old Cary Ann Medlin of Greenfield. It was a particularly cold-blooded murder, and Coe was justly convicted of the crime.

Coe deserves to die for what he did.

Coe’s original execution date has come and gone. He is still alive due a temporary stay of execution during which his attorneys are asking for more reviews of his case.

Tennessee has not executed anyone since 1960. Several years later, the Supreme Court struck down all existing death sentences as unconstitutional. But in so doing, the court laid out conditions under which the death penalty would meet constitutional requirements. Subsequently all but a handful of states revised their criminal codes to meet these conditions, and executions resumed in 1977 with the firing squad death of Gary Gilmore in Utah. In 1979, Robert Coe brutally murdered Cary Ann Medlin.

The death penalty is one of the social issues which finds Christian people on all sides. Christian churches have wrestled with it throughout their history. As early as the second century, executioners, magistrates and judges could be denied the Lord’s Supper because of their part in state executions. In late medieval times Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote against harshness in judicial sentencing. Yet both Catholic and Protestant churches either carried out or condoned death penalties until modern times in America and elsewhere.

In the passage from the Gospel of John of the woman caught in the act of adultery, the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees who bring the woman to Jesus accurately state that the law of Moses requires her to be executed for her adultery. Leviticus 20:10 says, “If a man commits adultery with another man's wife – with the wife of his neighbor – both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” This code is repeated in Deuteronomy. Let us note that the Law required that both the woman and the man be executed, but the scribes and the Pharisees, all men, somehow avoided taking the guilty man into custody. (The double standard was no less alive then as now.) Even so, the woman was indeed guilty, having been caught in the act, and according to the Law she deserved to die. “What do you say?” the men asked Jesus.

Jesus signals he won’t accept the question on the terms it is offered by crouching to write on the ground with his finger. “When Jesus does speak, he speaks to the situation of the scribes and Pharisees as well as to the woman. . . . Jesus treats the woman and the scribes and Pharisees as theological equals, each as human beings to whom words about sin can be addressed” (NIB).

Jesus offers all of his listeners an opportunity to break from old ways of justice, determined by the power of condemnation and death, to enter a new society where grace can endure even when punishment is called for. This new society with its new standards is the Kingdom of God.

At its core, this story in John is not really about the woman or her sin. Nor is it primarily about the self-righteous certainty of the men who accused and convicted her. The story is about how Christ challenges both crimes and punishments that contradict what Christ stands for. Jesus was certainly not sympathetic to the sin of adultery. He pointed out elsewhere that only adultery justified divorce. Jesus did not try to excuse her adultery to the men. In fact, Jesus didn’t seem very concerned about the woman at all – his directed all his attention toward the men who wanted to take her life. Faced with this unmistakably severe transgression of the law, Jesus questioned the cut and dried, hard-hearted manner in which the authorities sought to impose justice. Perhaps Williams Shakespeare was thinking about Christ’s words when he wrote in The Merchant of Venice–

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

...

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself; ...

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc. 1.)

Jesus condoned neither the crime the woman committed nor the violence the men wish to do. He recognized that they were both gripped in the sinful cycles of their past. If both the men and the woman are to be freed, they must all renounce their former ways. Jesus final words are spoken to the woman but are also addressed to the men with stones. The woman did deserve to die according to the Law, but all her accusers finally realized they did not deserve to kill her.

Jesus challenged both the woman and the men to peer into their own souls and stare in brutal honesty at themselves. By doing so they all, actually, received a blessing from the Son of God – ‘I do not condemn you’ – followed by a command, “Go and sin no more.”

 There is no denying that the Law of Moses lists a large number of offenses for which death is prescribed. Exodus lists murder as one, but simple assault on one’s parents is also a capital offense. Then, a few verses later we discover, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death”  (Exod 21:17). And we are also informed, “Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death. . .” (Exod 31:14a). How many of us would like to plead for our lives against that charge?

As far as I know, Christian proponents of the death penalty cite only the Judaic Law to support their position, never the Gospels. Yet Jesus said that love is the heart of the Law, and that God is a God of life, not death. If there is any theological support for the death penalty to be derived from the testament of the Good News of Jesus Christ, I have yet to see it, and I have done a great deal of reading on this subject over the years because I used to support the death penalty. What turned me from supporter to opponent of the death penalty finally was realizing that the Law of Moses is not the ultimate revelation of the nature and character of God or of God’s will. God is most fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, whose fate was to be executed by the state. Luke twenty-three records that even as the Romans nailed him to the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Robert Glen Coe is no Jesus Christ, and American justice is more fair than Roman justice, but Christ’s prayer still calls us to reflect whether we really know what we are doing when we push the buttons that cause lethal chemicals to flow into the veins of a man strapped to a gurney.

 There is an organization called, “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.” Its executive director is Renny Cushing, whose father was murdered. These are Renny’s words:

“At about 10 o’clock at night, there was a knock on the front door. My mother was lying on the couch watching the Celtics playoff game. My father was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, and he got up to answer the door. As he did, a couple of shotgun blasts rang out, ripped his chest apart, and he died in front of my mother. From that day, from that moment, I became the survivor of a homicide victim. And in the aftermath of that I had reason to contemplate – on numerous occasions and in some depth – how we deal as a society and individually in the aftermath of murder.”

We talk a lot about victims’ rights in the legal system. And we should, because for a long time the victim of crime was seen mostly as a witness to the crime rather than someone whose life has been shredded by violence. Relatives of murder victims feel emotions that others cannot comprehend. Bud Welch’s daughter, Julie, was killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Welch wrote:

      “All my life, I had always opposed the death penalty. My entire family has, even going back to my grandparents. Well, after Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the rage, the revenge, the hate – you can’t think of enough adjectives to describe what I felt like. I did change my mind about the death penalty. After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged – I mean, fry them. We didn’t need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. That was my feeling, that was my emotion. You no doubt saw McVeigh or Nichols being rushed from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the police do this is because people like me will kill them. The police presence around Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols was the very deterrent that kept me from being on death row in Oklahoma today. Because had I thought that if there was any opportunity to kill them, I would have done so.

    “For about the next eight months, I struggled with the thought of what’s going to happen to [McVeigh and Nichols], how am I going to get some peace. [The death penalty] sounded so wonderful to me at the time. I thought about that over the next eight months. I also remembered the statement that Julie had made to me driving across Iowa one time in her junior year. We heard a newscast on the radio about an execution that had happened in Texas the night before. Julie’s response to that was, “Dad, all they’re doing is teaching hate to their children in Texas.” I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, but I remembered her saying that. Then after she was killed, and after I got past [the] initial period, this kept echoing in my mind. I had this anguish about what was going to happen. The trials hadn’t even begun yet, and I went to asking myself, once they’re tried and executed, what then? How’s that going to help me? It isn’t going to bring Julie back. I asked that question for a period of two weeks probably. I realized that its all about revenge and hate. And revenge and hate is why Julie and 167 others are dead today. After I was able to get that revenge and hate out of my system, I made a statement to an Associated Press reporter one day that I did not believe in the death penalty.”

Renny Cushing wrote that survivors of homicide victims want three basic things.

1.    They want to know the truth, how it happened that somebody that they loved could be taken from them. They need to know the truth just to help them get back some control over their lives.

2.    The second thing they want is justice. With murder, said Cushing, the only real justice possible would be to exchange the life of the murdered person with the life of the murderer. But no exchange is possible because we can’t bring the murder victim back, no matter what we do to the killer. So we have to do the best we can to secure justice. One of the ways to do that is to restore the sense of security that’s been lost by families and society by the murder. And that means killers need to be separated from society. Both the surviving families and society need the security of doing that, to hold offenders accountable.

3.    The third thing survivors want is healing. Healing is not an event. The death penalty focuses upon a single event, raising the expectation that if you simply extinguish the life of someone who took a life, the execution itself will be a healing event. It’s a mistake, says Cushing, that if you just kill the killer it will all be better, and you’ll feel better, and you can just go on. The reality is, though, that healing is a process that goes on all the time. It is part of the burden that homicide survivors come to grips with, that healing is a process that will go on for the rest of their lives.

Cushing wrote, “I came to realize that those who were affected by his killing were not just [my] family, not just the people in the community. It also involved the families of the people who killed my father. The idea that I would be healed, that any murder victim would be healed, by inflicting pain upon the family of a murderer” is not true. Grief is not a zero-sum game. “My pain doesn’t get eased by inflicting pain on [them].” The death penalty just creates more victims. “One thing with the death penalty, there’s a kind of finality. When we kill people who kill our loved ones, we forever preclude the opportunity for those of us who want to figure out how to have an interactive forgiveness. The existence of the death penalty in and of itself becomes a barrier to victim healing. I don’t want to live in a society where, in the aftermath of murder, policy prevents people from healing.”

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:38, 44). Gandhi put it this way: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

 In the movie Saving Private Ryan, set in World War Two, Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, who is assigned the mission of finding Private Ryan to take him out of battle because all three of Ryan’s brothers have been killed in action. With a squad of men, Captain Miller sets forth. Before they find Ryan, two of Miller’s men are killed. One of Miller’s men rebels because he can’t make the math come out right – two of his friends dead before they even find this one faceless Ryan. He demands Captain Miller tell him why Ryan is so important to him.

Miller’s answer surprises them all. “I don’t know Ryan,” Captain Miller says. “I don’t care anything about him. I just want to go home. And if finding this Ryan makes that happen sooner rather than later, well then, that’s my mission.” With that Captain Miller walks to the body of their medic, who was killed shortly before, to pull it into a newly-dug grave. After a few moments the others join in to help. There is no more dissension. They will save Private Ryan, not for Ryan’s good, but for their own.

I don’t know Robert Coe. I don’t care anything about him. I have practically no sympathy for him. I won’t even try to argue that he does not deserve to die. I oppose his execution not for his sake but for mine. My call as a Christian disciple is to reduce violence, not condone more death. To the powers and principalities that seek to take life for life, I say, “Not in my name nor in the name of the Lord I serve.”

Some night soon Robert Coe will be strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber. There will be a group of selected witnesses there, of course, but you and I will be there, too, because we are the ones who finally make our laws. We will be there, and in each hand we are holding stones to throw at him. I pray that we will someday soon reach the spiritual maturity of the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus faced down, so we can drop our stones like they did. Perhaps we will finally realize that although Robert Coe may well deserve to die, not one of us deserves to kill him. _____________________

Statements by Renny Cushing and Bud Welch are found at http://www.mvfr.org. I have minimally edited them for length and clarity for hearing.

SecDef Hegseth and his pointless name game

NBC affiliate WFMY in Greensboro, N.C., reports:

NORTH CAROLINA, USA — The controversy surrounding the name of North Carolina’s Fort Liberty is back in the spotlight following remarks by the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

In 2022, the U.S. military spent over $2 million to rename Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty, distancing itself from Confederate ties as Fort Bragg was originally named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. However, during his first day on the job Monday, Hegseth referred to the base by its former name.

“Every moment that I’m here, I’m thinking about the guys and gals in Guam, in Germany, Fort Benning, and Fort Bragg, on missile defense sites and aircraft carriers,” Hegseth told reporters as he entered the Pentagon.

The mention of Fort Benning also stood out, as the Georgia base was renamed Fort Moore in 2023, another step in the Pentagon’s efforts to remove Confederate associations from military assets.

Hegseth’s remarks align with a promise President Donald Trump made on the campaign trail in Fayetteville, North Carolina three months ago. “Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?” Trump asked a crowd of supporters, receiving loud cheers. “So here’s what we do: we get elected, I’m doing it. I’m doing it.”

I am a retired Army artillery officer. I served a tour at Ft Bragg in the latter 1980s. I am very definitely a political conservative, but I cannot agree with reverting the name back to Bragg. Here is why:

Confederate General Braxton Bragg

1. Ft Bragg was founded in Sept. 1918 as an artillery training center. Called Camp Bragg at first (because it was considered a temporary installation), it was named for North Carolina native Gen. Braxton Bragg for his artillery actions during the Mexican-American War in 1847. 

So far, so good. Bragg's record as a mid-grade US Army officer was in fact stellar. But another important reason the camp was named after him was, frankly, to appease Southerners while the US was at war in Europe. In 1918, there was still a large number of Civil War veterans, Union and Confederate, still living, and to their children and grandchildren, that war was not old history, far removed in time or space. So, the camp was named after a CSA general who conveniently was an NC native and Army artillery officer. 

Please note that there are no military installations outside the old CSA that were named after CSA figures. I will also note that Gen. Bragg was a truly dismal battlefield general, which IMO is another reason not to revert to using his name. 

I also think, however, that Fort Liberty is a nitwit name. Find a post-Civil War American military hero or renowned wartime commander and use that. 

2. There are some hard truths about the CSA. I was born and raised in the Deep South. My family's roots in Middle Tenn. go back to just after the Revolutionary War. I have ancestral family members who fought (and some died) for the CSA on both my mom's and dad's side (also for the Union on my dad's). Alexander Stephens, vice president of the CSA, was my wife's great-great grandfather's brother.

I take no back seat to anyone for Southern heritage and upbringing.

Like probably most native Southerners of my generation, I was raised being taught that the real reasons for the Southern states' secession was to preserve states’ rights and that the northern economic lobby was choking the South's economy with high tariffs on Southern goods.

Slavery? Well, it was in the mix somewhere, but slavery was not the real reason for secession. 

It is a lie, pure and simple. 

The states’ rights and tariffs arguments are entirely absent from Southern apologia until after the Civil War. In 1860 and before, no one in the South was using those topics to justify secession. Furthermore, in 1860 federal tariffs on Southern goods were lower than they had been since 1816. 

Why did the Southern states secede? To protect slavery, period.

Read the 11 seceded states' actual acts of secession, beginning with South Carolina's, and you will see that slavery was the sole reason for secession. South Carolina's act makes this very unambiguous: protection of slavery was the only topic presented as driving secession. Same with Mississippi. And the others.

The Confederate States of America was founded to do one thing only: to preserve the power of one class of people to literally own as chattel property another class of people. There is no other reason the CSA existed.

We are long, long past the time where any figure of the CSA should be honored with naming any federal property after him.  

I wrote  at greater length upon the CSA's secession and raison d'etre here: "Confederate monuments: So what? Now What?"

Reforming Work - a Reflection for Labor Day

Genesis 2:15

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Colossians 3:23-24

Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, 24 since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

Today is Labor Day, when Americans pause and reflect on the meaning of work and honor working people. Let us acknowledge that that many people who are looking for employment, perhaps within our own families. Let us keep them in our prayers and send them job leads if we find any. And those of us who are working or, in retirement, enjoying the fruits of labor past, let us be thankful for it and be willing to help others now. 

On Labor Day we acknowledge the importance of work. We spend more time working or perhaps looking for work than anything else we do. It would pay, therefore, to take a look at what Christian faith can tell us about work and its place in our lives. 

I remember when people used to utter the words, “Protestant work ethic” as a shorthand way of talking about certain habits of work that were seen as the foundation upon which America’s material prosperity was built. The Protestant work ethic was a philosophy born from the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s. Until then the labor or ordinary people was thought to lack either divine sanction or divine opportunity. Instead, what ordinary working people did was seen as necessary but spiritually deficient. Ordinary people were thought incapable of attaining anything better than a "secondary grade of piety." The "perfect form of the Christian life" was "holy and permanently separate from the common customary life of man." devoted "to the service of God alone."  

Reformation theology turned that around. The Protestant reformers insisted that the ordinary occupations of men and women should be understood as honoring God just as well as the monastic or priestly life. One’s “calling” in life came to be understood as any honorable occupation that a person understood was willed by God for him or her, so anyone, not just clergy, could be called by God to a lifetime of Christian service in different ways.

This Protestant work ethic says we are to be honest, hardworking, reliable, sober, mindful of the future, appropriate in our relationships and successful. We add that those things enable a Christian to give glory to God.

In Ephesians 4:28, Paul said that people should work with their own hands at what is good, in order that to have something to share with one who has need. Honorable work is honest work, honestly performed. The Protestant work ethic extends past that simple rule, though. There is an object to work for Christian people: to build up the Kingdom of God for the greater benefit of all the people of God. In the final analysis, all our labor is to be for the glory of God by the way it enables us to be about the ongoing work of Christ in the world.

I think we must not separate the dignity of work from human dignity. I read recently that in Japan almost no one ever gets fired from a job. We probably might say that is because the work ethic and skill levels among Japanese workers are so strong there. But that is not the reason. The reason hardly anyone ever gets fired is because by law terminated employees must be given very substantial separation payments and benefits. But if an employee simply quits, there is no such requirement. 

So a common practice in Japan is for nonperforming workers to be assigned extremely menial, unimportant duties that, the company hopes, will so dispirit the worker that he will finally quit in despair rather than go nuts. 

If you think that can never happen here, think again. In New York City it is so difficult to fire certain kinds of city employees that the ones identified for termination wind up being reassigned to completely empty offices or even utility closets, devoid of any responsibilities at all, while continuing to collect full salary and benefits, which cost the city $22 million one year recently. 

This is not what God intended from the beginning. In the beginning, God gave Adam work to do in the Garden. This means that Adam in his vocation was a partner with God in accomplishing God's intentions for the created order. It’s true that things went sour later. Indeed, the first murder recorded in the Bible, when Cain killed his brother Abel, was in part over the way Cain perceived the nature of Abel’s work and vocation. 

Paul wrote in Colossians 3, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for mortals, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”

Paul points toward a unity in our lives that brings even our jobs under the lordship of Christ. In other words, he is describing striving for a restoration of our work to the kind that Adam enjoyed. We are not to spend our lives idly, but in divine vocation. And even though there is an earthly imperative to pay bills and hopefully enjoy life without financial worry, we also are called to remember what Jesus said: we cannot serve both God and money. 

But we can serve God by making money while remembering that no earthly treasure lasts and that Jesus also told us, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” where it can be lost, corrupted or stolen. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” for God's care never ends. Where our treasure is, that’s where our hearts follow. 

Jesus is talking about more than money. He means the whole of life and what we do with our time. And that is the necessity of seeking a divine vocation because there is a difference between a job and a vocation. A job is what we do to earn a living. A vocation is what gives our lives meaning and purpose. A job is always related, usually closely, to worldly affairs. A vocation transcends the world even though it is carried out in the world.

For truly fortunate persons their job and their vocation can be united or closely related. When I was a candidate in ministry, I decided to ask a number of serving pastors what was the single most important thing about pastoral service to each of them. I asked twelve pastors independently, over a period of a few months and all twelve gave me exactly the same answer: “I know that I am doing with my life what God wants me to do with it.” 

That is precisely how I feel, too. I consider myself profoundly blessed to have my vocation and my work united into a singularity. I never awake in the morning wondering what my life is about. 

I am not saying, by the way, that I do this job well or effectively. It is to say that in my heart I know I have found that place that Methodist author Robert Robert Kohler wrote about: “There are different kinds of voices calling you to different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which” voice is the call of God rather than the voice of self-interest, cultural values or something else. 

One’s vocation is the life-work that a man or woman is called to by God. It is always a call to ministry of some kind. One’s vocation may or may not be the way that you make your living. I have known some persons who thought their income-producing job was merely a crutch that propped up their true mission in life, their vocation. 

Kohler wrote, “The kind of work that God usually calls you to do is the kinds of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done.” Your vocation is not necessarily what takes the most time in your daily lives. It is what gives the rest of your life focus and meaning. Frederick Buechner wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” God calls each Christian to use his or her gifts in the world. One test of identifying your calling is to discern whether it satisfies your hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world. If someone doesn’t have a hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world, then their chances of discovering their true vocation are slim. Yet unless persons discern their vocation, they waste their time, money and in fact their very lives.

In 1967, Martin Luther King preached on, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” in which he said, 

… we must discover what we are called to do. And once we discover it we should set out to do it with all of the strength and all of the power that we have in our systems. And after we’ve discovered what God called us to do, after we’ve discovered our life’s work, we should set out to do that work so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. Now this does not mean that everybody will do the so-called big, recognized things of life. Very few people will rise to the heights of genius in the arts and the sciences; very few collectively will rise to certain professions. … But we must see the dignity of all labor. 

Perhaps some of you feel that your work is a calling, enabling you to honor and serve God in ways you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. If so, be glad! Christian faith sanctifies every honorable occupation. There isn’t any difference between the secular and the sacred, not really. Jesus was a preacher for three years but a carpenter for at least twenty. That sanctifies work. All of life is God’s, so let us strive to make sure that all we do glorifies God.

Here is Dr. King's complete sermon:

Armed and Vulnerable

 Ephesians 6:10-18

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14 Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. 15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 16 With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.

Early one morning the general manager of a very large department store got a phone call from his security director. “There’s been a break in,” the director reported. The manager drove right over. When he entered the store, the sight took his breath away. Merchandise was scattered everywhere. Clothes were hanging in the sporting goods section. Wristwatches and bracelets were stacked in the linens department. Men’s shirts were arranged in a neat display in the middle of the children’s shoe section. As the department managers sorted the merchandise out, they made a startling discovery. Nothing was actually missing. As far as they could tell, whoever had broken in had not stolen anything, but had just rearranged the store’s goods. It was all still there, just in the wrong place. Most puzzling, all the price tags were switched around. A diamond brooch had a price tag for $12.95; a bath towel was priced at $599. It was completely baffling, and no one could make any sense of it.

It seems odd that Paul would write about military armament on behalf of the prince of peace. It’s quite unlikely Paul was ever in military service, since Jews were excused from serving in the Roman army. So Paul surely had no first-hand experience with the outfit of armor he described in his letter to the Ephesian Christians.

It also seems unbecoming that Paul would use warrior images in giving advice to Christian people, whose savior rejected the use of armed force. When soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus stopped Peter from using his sword to protect him. Yet, there it is, smack in the middle of the New Testament, the armor of God and the sword of the Spirit, the basic kit of the well-armed Christian.

Ephesus was on the west coast of modern Turkey. It was the most important trading city of its region, with a population of about three hundred thousand people. The temple of the Diana at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, housing an image of Diana that was said to have dropped directly from the home of the gods.

The temple was supported by 127 columns, each of them almost two hundred feet high. The Ephesians were very proud of the temple. During the Roman period, they promoted the worship of Diana by minting coins with the inscription, “Diana of Ephesus.”

The book of Acts relates Ephesus did not accept Christian preaching and evangelism easily. The silversmiths of the city had enormous financial interests in selling their goods to the temple and the temple’s gift shop. They stirred up the city’s various artisans against Paul and his companions. Soon the whole city was in an uproar and Paul’s companions were seized. Eventually, things calmed down and the men were released, but the Ephesians weren’t happy that substantial numbers of their residents were converting to Christianity and abandoning worship at the temple of Diana.

When Paul wrote to his Christian brothers and sisters to put on the whole armor of God, it was his way of reminding them that if they were going to follow Christ, they’d best be ready for a real fight. They would have to be prepared to be attacked on account of their faith. Note that all the equipment listed is purely defensive, except the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

It’s tempting to allegorize every element of the armor, focusing upon individual armaments and expounding upon their individual significance. But Paul isn’t writing allegory. It’s more of a metaphor and should be looked at as a whole.

We live in a world that has changed dramatically since the Christian Ephesians began to follow Jesus. In fact, we live in a culture that has changed dramatically since most of us were children. Any of us older than thirty-five or forty know that the culture our children are growing up in isn’t the same one we grew up in. William Willimon of the Duke University Chapel related a conversation he had with a small group of schoolteachers one evening.

“We wonder if you preachers know what we're up against in the schools,” one asked.

“Like what?” Willimon asked.

“Like a sixth grader who has been abandoned by her parents, both of whom are physicians,” said one.

“Like an eight-year-old who is addicted to cocaine,” said another. On and on they went, citing the pathologies common in public schools today.

TV shows once didn’t have ratings to warn parents that they were too racy or violent for children. Supermarket check-out lines didn’t display mainstream magazines that gave explicit advice for “mind-blowing sex” right on the cover. Police didn’t patrol school halls even in inner cities.

There have been an awful lot of good things that have come about in the last thirty or forty years. We have better health care and live longer lives. Our environment is cleaner. We don’t make black people sit in the back of the bus anymore. Yet, despite the many positive achievements and accomplishments of the past generation, many people, especially parents, often find that they are strangers in their own homeland. They are ill at ease because the world doesn’t seem to support the way they want to live and the way they want to raise their children.

It’s as if one morning we woke up early, went outside to the culture we live in, and discovered that all the elements of the good life are there, but in the wrong place, with all the price tags switched. We’re baffled and we can’t make sense of it. We’re unsure that our cultural values are what they should be. The Walking Dead gets millions of viewers but it’s not clear how it is helping us live better lives or that we should let our kids watch it. We strive for a more just society, but watch befuddled as revelations about what Planned Parenthood really does just keep getting more shocking, and that apparently can’t be stopped by the law and the courts. It’s not very difficult to get the impression that the world is marching to a different drummer, buying a different set of goods.

So, yes, the world has shifted. We live in a post-Christian era.

“Having once had a comfortable [monopoly] over American life, [mainline Protestant churches] have now been disestablished from the [cultural] center. Now there is no more free ride for us, no more crutches from the culture. If we are going to remain Christian, if our young [people] are going to grow up embracing this faith, we shall have to make them that way. The world won’t do it for us” (Willimon).

Christianity, which once found itself located firmly at the center of popular culture, now discovers that it is viewed by that culture as subversive. This is not new this year. In the 1990s, Promise Keepers filled football stadiums teaching men how to live honorable lives of duty and loyalty. Pop culture and media derided the movement and accused it of trying to turn back the clock to an earlier time when adultery was still socially unacceptable and men believed in one life, one wife. Pretty dangerous stuff, huh?

So we might ponder that much of the world generally regards us Christians like it regarded the hippies of the nineteen sixties—we are the counterculture of the last gasps of the second millennium. We are regarded with deep suspicion because we live and work in a world that lives by different slogans, has different visions and speaks a different language than the church. We confront a world which often isn’t supportive of Christian ideals and sometimes downright hostile. So Paul tells us we’d better not be unarmed and unprepared. We need to prepare for our struggle as carefully as a soldier prepares to go on campaign.

Being a soldier for Christ is not a solitary venture. The idea that there is such a thing as a solitary Christian is a contradiction in terms. Even the best armed soldier of Paul’s day or our own would perish quickly trying to fight alone. A soldier completely depends on his buddies to see him through tough times, to help him prepare for future rigors, to help him simply survive.

For that reason we have the church. The church is where we find our buddies. Anyone who has seen hard duty in military service never uses the word “buddy” like a civilian. A soldier’s buddy isn’t just some casual acquaintance. Your buddy is your other self. The prospect of your buddy perishing is more horrific than of your own death. Military psychologists learned long ago that soldiers in battle don’t fight for flag or glory, but because they love their buddies.

Soldiers wage war; the church is to wage peace. As Paul wrote, our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the ungodly compulsions and temptations of the fallen world. So we need the moral equivalent of war, in William James’ terms. And that means we need each other, organized in the church.

I am not saying that we can’t be good Christians without actively participating in the life of a church. We can’t be any kind of Christian unless we do so. Christianity is not something that is, it is something that does. And Christianity does only within the collective context of the community of faith. To withdraw from the active life of the community of faith or decline to join it is spiritually suicidal. The whole armor of God can’t be worn by solitary persons. It takes the entire church to wear it together.

So we must gather for worship. We gather to announce God in a world that lives as if there is no God. We speak to one another as beloved brothers and sisters in a world which encourages us to live as strangers. We must pray to God to give us what we cannot have by our own efforts in a world which teaches us that we are self-sufficient. In such a world, what we do on Sunday morning becomes a matter of life and death. (Willimon)

Of all the armament Paul lists, the only weapon for offense is the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. Our helmets and breastplates and shield may get battered and dented, but we can respond only with the word of God.

John’s Gospel relates that the Word became flesh and walked and lived among us. In Jesus Christ there is abundant life. The word of God we know through Christ is the promise of grace and preservation. God is love. To wield the sword of the Spirit is not to strike down with violence, but to embrace with love. When we are assailed, we are to respond in love. We are to announce and do grace and mercy.

So the sword isn’t good for ungodly purposes. This is not a sword you can use to cheat your customers or business partners. It isn’t a sword you can use to chop down the poor. This sword can’t be used to slice people up with rumors or speech of hostility or condemnation. The word of God never does any of those things.

Jesus said we are to do good to our enemies and love them. Perhaps that is the reason we need to wear armor, for love makes us vulnerable. David Lowes Watson wrote,

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it safe in a casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is—hell.

Because Christian people are a people of love we will always be armed and vulnerable. When that ceases to be, then we’ve defected to the other side.

The Christians in Ephesus had a great advantage over us. Their culture was groping in the darkness of paganism, so it was clear that the culture should have no part defining the role of God’s people in the world. It is not so easy for us, for our culture is not wholly bad. But we have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as living in a “Christian nation.” Maybe that was never really true, but if it was, it isn’t true now. Christendom has vanished.

We must reject the illusions, seductions and false alternatives of our time to reassert the ageless truth that only Jesus Christ is Lord. In the very moment of our clearest announcement of the Gospel to the world, we will find that as Christ’s witnesses to truth and life we will have the privilege of helping to make God’s reign real in the world. With Christ, we will “preach good news to the poor, proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed [and] proclaim the . . . Lord's favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

A prayer for Memorial Day

I did not write this but I first used it so long ago that I do not recall whence it came. I present here as a responsive. 

PRAYER FOR MEMORIAL DAY

Holy and redeeming God, may we honor your holy name by living up to the inheritance of your salvation, as we bear the name of your son, Jesus Christ our savior, with passion for his work of reconciliation of all the world. 

May your vision of peace and justice be realized and enacted among nations embroiled in war, among families affected or bereaved by war, and may all hearts that find their rest in you.

Lead us to that day when every tear is dried, every life is fulfilled, and the law of love is written on our hearts.

We thank you, Lord, for the lives of all those whose sacrifices have made our freedom possible. We beg your grace for our country and your wisdom to guide each of our citizens.

Let us not squander the freedom we have been bequeathed by those who died to preserve it. 

More than in any human system, let us live as redeemed disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whose life, death and resurrection we are made free indeed.

Remove from human beings the arrogance of power, our will to anger, our reliance on weapons, and our love of violence.

Chasten us with humility and strengthen our trust in you. Make us agents of your peace in all places. We lift up to you the persons whose names we gratefully remember this day, and in remembering we pause in silence:

We pause for a time of remembrance

O almighty God and most merciful Father, as we remember these your servants, remembering with gratitude their courage and strength, we hold before you those who mourn them.

Look upon your bereaved servants with your mercy. As this day brings them memories of those they have lost awhile, may it also bring your consolation and the assurance that their loved ones are alive now and forever in your living presence. In the name of the Prince of Peace, our Savior Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

Going to a theme park? Be prepared for fist fights. . .

Multiple theme parks across the country are enforcing stricter rules about adults being required to accompany children in the parks. Knotts Berry Farm even closed down several hours early one day because of teens' behavior.

The largest group to implement chaperone policies is Cedar Fair, which owns and operates many parks, including California's Knott's Berry Farm. Knott's Berry Farm was forced to close early on July 16, 2022, due to "unruly behavior and altercations involving a number of teenagers," according to a statement from the park.

A few days later, on July 20, 2022, the park announced it would be implementing a chaperone policy on Fridays and Saturdays only. It also updated its code of conduct page to include details of the police.

A large number of other parks have implemented stricter rules as well. 

Why has this become an issue? Well, Consider: "U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households," for one. 

For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage. A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.

And according to the Census Bureau, the number of children living with a single parent climbs sharply as children get older. 

Note that among children 12-17 years old, 36.6 percent live with only their mother and 40 percent live with only their father. That makes almost 81 percent of all minor teens living with only one parent.

And as we pastors all know, worship attendance or other participation by post-Boomer generations has fallen sharply - and the younger the generation, the more sharply.

American religious identity has experienced nearly three decades of consistent decline. But this roughly linear trend masks significant generational variation in religious identity. Research has consistently shown that every generation of adults is somewhat less religious than the generation that preceded it.[7] This pattern continues with Generation Z demonstrating less attachment to religion than the millennial generation did.[8]

In terms of identity, Generation Z is the least religious generation yet. More than one-third (34 percent) of Generation Z are religiously unaffiliated, a significantly larger proportion than among millennials (29 percent) and Generation X (25 percent). Fewer than one in five (18 percent) baby boomers and only 9 percent of the silent generation are religiously unaffiliated.

It’s not only a lack of religious affiliation that distinguishes Generation Z. They are also far more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic. Eighteen percent of Gen Z affirmatively identify as either atheist (9 percent) or agnostic (9 percent). In contrast, fewer than one in 10 (9 percent) baby boomers and 4 percent of the silent generation identifies as atheist or agnostic.

But there is a lot more to this drop than mere year of birth, there is politics, too:

A growing body of research finds that religious practice and identity have become entangled with politics.[11] What is notable is just how recent some of these shifts have been.

According to Gallup, in 2021, only 35 percent of liberals said they were a member of a church or other place of worship.[12] But liberals did not always have such low rates of membership. In fact, the left has experienced a precipitous drop in church membership over the past three decades. In 1998, a majority of liberals (57 percent) were members of a church or other type of religious organization.

Conservatives have also experienced a steady drop in church membership, but it has not been nearly as steep. More than six in 10 (62 percent) conservatives belonged to a church or congregation in 2021, a significant decline from 1998 when 77 percent reported being a member.

But it’s not only that liberals register lower levels of religious participation or membership. They are also less likely to have been raised in a religious tradition. Liberals are nearly twice as likely as conservatives are to say they grew up religiously unaffiliated (13 percent vs. 7 percent, respectively). They also report engaging in formal and informal religious activities at lower rates. Rather than religious disengagement reflecting decisions liberals make as adults, their trajectory of disassociation appears to have been set much earlier.

It is not a coincidence that more and more children are being born to never-married mothers: Statista's graph agrees with the CDC's report:

Percentage of births to unmarried women in the United States from 1980 to 2021

Increasingly, the traditional, two-parent, religious nuclear family is becoming an exception rather than the rule. Heck, according to these numbers is already is the exception and it is no accident that this is the deliberate intention of the American Left.  And so we are reminded once again:

But at least some people are taking what is now a counter-cultural position: "‘Get married and start a family’: Georgia Tech grad speaker."

Students should not be solely focused on making money and becoming a success in their field, according to a Super Bowl-winning kicker who spoke at Georgia Institute of Technology’s graduation ceremony.

Harrison Butker, the kicker of the Kansas City Chiefs and an alumnus of Georgia Tech, instead urged graduates to “get married and start a family.”

He said this is an antidote to ongoing mental health problems in society, including loneliness and depression. He also reminded attendees that not every good deed or success will be noticed but “what is done in the darkness will be brought to the light,’” Butker said, quoting the Bible.

The devout Catholic and pro-life advocate then showed off “the most important ring” he had to the crowd – his wedding ring. Butker also has two Super Bowl rings.

And Glenn Reynolds writes that we are seeing the return of "Those shocking bourgeois values."

Mass shootings: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans"

Update, April 2023: I wrote this in 2018 after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz massacred 17 students and faculty at Parkland High School, Florida. With the recent murders of three children and three faculty at Nashville's The Covenant School on March 17 by 28-year-old Audrey Hale, I am reposting it. Nothing has changed, of course, because politicians on both the Left and the Right are far more interested in scoring points against the other side than protecting the lives of children. 

If things proceed according to pattern, there will be energetic debate after the latest school massacre about stopping such a horror from happening again, then the news media will move on to other topics. And the American people, who have generally been trained over the last 50-plus years not to think something is important unless it's on TV, will move on also.

And in a few months or next year, when it happens again, lather, rinse, repeat.

This inability to take meaningful action is due to several factors, one of which is the existing (and strengthening) political divide in the country. But the main reasons, I think, are pretty simple:

• both sides firmly believe that the other side is solely responsible for the deadlock, 
• both sides' most prominent voices insist that there is a "silver bullet" solution that by itself will completely resolve the issue, and
• neither side will admit that its own broader political core beliefs are already part of the cause for these shootings. Both demand that all of the surrendering must be done by the other side.

So I proceed on the basis of this post's title: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." I learned this very well when I was assigned to the Army Operations Center in the early 1990s at the Pentagon. The Army's chief of staff was Gen. Carl Vuono. He sometimes found occasion during our briefings to him about current and planned operations to hammer home a point: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." 

Don't tell me what you hope will happen, don't tell me what you wish you could do, he repeated. "Give me a plan that makes it happen."

Stop offering "Bell the cat" solutions

One of Aesop's fables 

... concerns a group of mice who debate plans to nullify the threat of a marauding cat. One of them proposes placing a bell around its neck, so that they are warned of its approach. The plan is applauded by the others, until one mouse asks who will volunteer to place the bell on the cat. All of them make excuses. The story is used to teach the wisdom of evaluating a plan not only on how desirable the outcome would be, but also on how it can be executed. It provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility, and how this affects the value of a given plan.

Anyone who thinks that there is one thing that, if done, will stop mass shootings (whether at schools or elsewhere) is actually not thinking at all. They are making political statements, not relevant statements, and are so convinced of the moral purity of their own side that they think that a wish is a plan and that their wish, if fulfilled, will automatically result in zeroing out mass shootings. 

Here are two examples, one from each side. On the Left: 

• "We must ban AR-15s and similar weapons."

In fact, we cannot ban these weapons. I am not saying we should not ban them, or must not ban them. I am saying we cannot ban them. It is impossible. The same with "high-capacity" magazines. 

Yes, we could legislate that they may not be manufactured or imported into the country. So? There are still tens of millions already here (no one knows how many). Will you ban them also? If so, as The Beatles sang long ago, "We'd all love to see the plan." Besides, when testifying before Congress, the director of the ATF, Steve Dettelbach, told the House Appropriations Committee that he was not able to define what an "assault rifle" is. 

Don't even utter the word, "Australia." Their 1996 ban was mandatory, requiring residents to hand over their firearms to the government, but the government paid for them, which would be mandatory here (that pesky Constitution's "takings clause"). Where will the the US government get $30 billion (at minimum) to do that? Do not even dare to suggest cutting only spending beloved by the Right, such as defense. If you are not willing to pare Left-loved spending, then you are not serious about stopping school shootings at all. You're just trying to score political points. 

Are you willing to zero out payouts and tax-money support, for example, of Planned Parenthood, the NEA, NPR, etc. to diminish the number of AR weapons in America? No? Then you will understand why I am completely ignoring you. 

That said, in Australia's ban only 20 percent of Australian gun owners complied. One out of five. The ban, btw, had little effect on crime rates or suicides there, but it did create a thriving black market in firearms, including black-market importation. See here and here, for example. 

Ban AR-type weapons? Well, show me your plan. If in your plan no one's ox gets gored but your political opponents', you have not got a plan to save kids' lives, you have a platform for fund raising and campaigning. 

And finally: "'Assault Weapon' Bans Look More Legally Vulnerable Than Ever." 

On the Right:

• "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." 

If I hear that one more time I will not know whether to throw up or just laugh out loud. Okay, good guys with guns do stop bad guys with guns countless times per year (that's why we arm police, after all),  and good guys (cops) with guns definitely stopped Audrey Hale before she could murder anyone else.

And yes, schools by law are "gun free zones," and yes, "gun free zone" really is a euphemism for "defenseless people here."

Fine. But then your advocates post stupid stuff like this:

This meme has been around since at least 2012 and is simply false. False as in "untrue," as Israelis on social media have attempted to refute. Here is Israel Today:

There is a picture going around the Internet that I have seen about a dozen times today that claims that Israeli teachers are packing heat. Well, are they? The answer is “NO.” There may be some exceptions in dangerous areas like the West Bank (where five percent of Israelis live), but in general, Israeli teachers are not walking around like it’s the Wild Wild West, strapped with a six shooter. No, our teachers are not focused on shooting, but educating. That doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t protect young students.

In the picture, the students are on an outing. While it appears that the teacher is holding a rifle, I have never seen such a thing in ten years of living here. Rest assured however, they are under armed protection. In most cases it is an armed guard or a soldier that will accompany a class, not the teacher. And my guess is that the woman with the gun is a security guard, not a teacher.

Secondly, they are not armed in the classroom. Is that really the image you want to imprint on the minds of six-year-olds? (That would be Hamas.)

Even so, suppose that it was made legal for faculty and staff to volunteer to go armed in schools. What's your plan to implement? Just let them get a carry license and go for it? Will they be required also to take shoot-or-no-shoot training, repeated at intervals? Will they be paid extra for carrying? Will they wear distinctive identifying clothing so they don't shoot each other by mistake? Will their local governments accept the financial liability for using their weapons when the shooter, if he lives, or his family, if he doesn't, sue the teacher who shoots him and the rest of the district? (and they will sue.) All of these factors also apply to other categories of potential guards, such as veterans or retired police.

In the wake of the Aurora, Colo., mass murder in a movie theater, I wrote elsewhere about the ignore-reality advocates of the "good guy with a gun" argument as applying to crowded venues of panicked people, which is what Parkland's high school became when the shooting started.

But let's assume you do unmistakably locate the shooter and decide to engage him. You have a 9mm compact-sized, semi-auto pistol with the typical 7-10 round magazine (though the Beretta PX4 compact holds up to 15). The killer is firing madly, apparently about 25 feet away. You shoot at him.

You will miss. Your heart rate is through the roof. So is your respiration rate. You are sweating like a marathon runner. Your hands are shaking. These are involuntary physiological responses and you can do pretty much nothing about them. They badly affect shooting accuracy. Also, you are being jostled by panicked people trying to get away. And firearms trainers know that even on a range, firing under stress makes people fire high unless they are collected enough to correct for it intentionally. However, being a typical permit holder, the only actual pistol training you ever got was when you went to the class to certify the permit application. When you shoot again, you will miss then, too. And the next time.

But now you have identified yourself as a threat to the killer, assuming his state of mind lets him notice your fire (which he might not, to be fair). So he turns his semi-auto AR-15 on you and starts pulling the trigger. Now you are dead or badly wounded. The shooter is unharmed and still shooting.

In 2011, not even the very pro-gun site, The Truth About Guns could endorse the idea that more people going armed would do anything to stop public-venue mass shootings. Even so, as I have said, show me your comprehensive plan and I will listen. Not until then. See here, too. (However, it is probably appropriate here for me to explain why I am an armed pastor.) 

Stop proposing to bell the cat, all of you. There are zero steps to end school shootings or make them much more difficult that are not going to press hard on what all of us hold dear.

What can we do now?

Let's start with what can be done fairly quickly, which is make carrying out such a shooting more difficult, perhaps so difficult that that fact alone will deter an attempt. It is very worth noting that according to Nashville police, Covenant School murderer Audrey Hale rejected at least one other target venue because it had "too much security."

The Saturday after Parkland, Nashville's Tennessean newspaper published a video about such measures, featuring Sean Burke, president of the School Safety Advocacy Council, who said that "layers" of security at military installations can be model for all schools to remain safe. URL here, please watch the 91-second video.   

Not everything he says translates cleanly to civilian schools. For example, just getting onto a military installation is highly restricted and requires vetting at the entrance gate. But we can and should start with physical security measures for three reasons.

1. First, they will be effective.
2. Second, they don't tread on either sides' core values.
3. Third, they are local-government initiatives, hence do not depend on the federal behemoth to rouse itself, and these initiatives would be poor federal ones anyway. 

The basic principal is simple: Make school shootings hard to do

Making school shootings difficult to carry out consists of two main things: First, it must become very difficult for a shooter to enter a school or its ground with weapons. Second, the schools' designs must inhibit successfully carrying out attempts.

The same Israeli site that refuted the notion that Israeli teachers go armed also says this:

On the other hand. I have never seen a school in Israel that was not fenced in. You must go through a locked gate that is guarded by an armed shomer, a security guard. He or she, on the other hand, is not concerned with educating, but protecting. He or she will ask you why you are there? “What is your child’s name?” “Show me your I.D. card.” And he or she would not let you bring a weapon inside.

Just yesterday (4/5/2023) Nashville's CBS affiliate carried a news story about "safety film" for school windows:

Safety film is a thin clear material that adheres to the glass. It's more affordable than bulletproof glass, making it a popular option for schools, homes and businesses.

"The bullet still goes through it so we always want to point that out that safety film is not bulletproof," said Dave Andrews, president of Solar Insulation. "So it's two levels of security, but this will keep people from coming in through the doors but it's not going to keep bullets from going through."

What safety film does is stop the glass from shattering when struck by one or more bullets. Killer Hale literally shot a door window to pieces at The Covenant School and then stepped through to enter the school. Had the door be layered in safety film, the bullets would have made only bullet holes, but the glass would have remained otherwise intact. 

"That's the idea is to keep them moving or they have too much trouble and then they go away," said [Dave] Andrews.

Entry security and simple access to school grounds must become more arduous than now, all the time. Every active doorway into a school must become guarded, and not by teachers or staff. Metal detectors and backpack inspections, all intrusive, yes, must become the routine. Arrival times for grades, not just for schools, must become staggered to avoid large clusters of students standing outside the school, presenting mass targets, and to avoid large numbers enduring bad weather awaiting entry. End-of-day exits must likewise be staggered.

Interior reinforcements must be made - bullet-resistant glass in all windows, for example, and strong locks with backups on doors. Classrooms in newly-built schools should have very quick and easy exits to the outside (I believe this has actually been designed in for a number of years).

Shooter drills need to be rehearsed by all, teachers and students alike. They can be age appropriate, but trust me, high-school students already know what's happening in America, and will not be traumatized by rehearsing what to do in case of gunfire.

We will have to "do school" differently to reduce the likelihood of shooters attempting the deed or succeeding if they do. It will not look like what we are doing now.

But how is Nashville's school system doing on implementing these are other security measures? Well, they don't. 

Despite all of the options, Metro Nashville Schools has no SROs in elementary schools. No Stop-The-Bleed kits, no security cameras, no ballistic film, no door barricades, and some very questionable training according to people with credibility.

 

A safety scorecard without a single check mark.

TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

None of this will happen overnight - nothing can - but they are all doable and can happen relatively quickly compared to the federal leviathan. And yes, they will cost money, but that can be raised far more quickly at local levels than federal. 

BTW, Tennessee's US senators introduced a bill on March 30 to provide $900 million for school safety. The bill provides funding for  

... both public and private schools to train and hire veterans and former law enforcement officers to serve as school safety officers, hire off duty law enforcement officers, and provide funding to harden schools and increase physical security. 

But the Biden White House almost immediately rejected it.

I would infinitely prefer that new initiatives stay local and not be gutted by the black hole of the US Treasury, however.

Besides, there is no reason that significant federal funds cannot be reallocated to states for this purpose without raising expenditures or the deficit. As I have said, anyone who is not willing to take unpalatable actions, or who in convinced that all the pain must be borne on only the other side, is not serious about this. Federal expenditures dear to both the Left and Right need to be identified for deletion and reassignment.

Once again: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans."