Tags
Anti-Gun Doctors, Back to School, Bulletproof assurance of your unconditional love!, Bulletproof Backpack, Epistemology of a good guy, False sense of security, Gun Violence, Life is short, Life is short-live for God, National Rifle Association, Psalm 20:7, Security of unconditional love, Stay in your lane., The place of violence in our times, This is my lane!, What do you trust?
From CNN: A Chilling sign of today’s America
With children going back to school, there’s just something off about “the soaring sales of bulletproof backpacks for kids”, writes Richard Galant of CNN.
…One backpack is described as being able to “withstand 9-mm, .44 magnum and shotgun ammunition” — but won’t protect against “rifles or assault weapons.”
Back-to-school shopping for armour plated backpacks is one chilling sign that America is a nation traumatized by mass shootings, including [recent events] in El Paso and Dayton.
The Only Way to Stop a Bad Guy with a Gun…
Equipping children with an insufficiently armoured backpack, and possibly arming teachers with the sufficiently fatal force of a gun just seems like a lethal mixture. I’m just waiting for the moment a good teacher goes rogue or suffers a mental breakdown, and uses their school-issued gun on their students. This is NOT wishful thinking; it’s just inevitable, isn’t it?
The rest of the world looks on with bewilderment at the U.S. – the only nation in the world with near weekly mass shootings. While virtually every other developed country share the same rates of mental illness and exposure to violent video games, no other nation has such breezy access and wide ownership of automatic weapons.
A bulletproof backpack is hardly the answer to what ails us.
Stay in your Lane! This is my Lane!
Finding cures for what ails us is precisely what the medical community tries to answer. Unfortunately, last November the National Rifle Association told “anti-gun” doctors to “stay in their lane” after a series of research papers about firearm injuries and deaths was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, including new recommendations to reduce gun violence:
Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.
A fascinating reaction, given that the NRA does not form the government they so effectively lobby. I suspect the NRA consults no one but themselves as well. But on this point, the NRA is completely correct: the medical community consulted no one… but the research, statistics, and daily emergency room anecdotes of gun violence. Trauma surgeons like Katherine Holte, MD, would post on twitter, complete with photos of her emergency room after a gun trauma event:
I am a trauma surgeon. This is what it looks like. #StayInMyLane #ThisisMyLane
How about the Bulletproof Assurance of your Love?
I think these backpacks just give children a false sense of security (or is this really about the parents?). The security your children need more than this bulletproof backpack is the bulletproof assurance of your unconditional love, the certainty of an emotionally safe home, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing life is short – no matter how long you live… therefore live for the One who made us for Himself.
When you next pack your child off to school, make sure you’ve given your best. You never really know how short life is until it’s gone.
What does this have to do with “More Enigma”?
How we wrestle control for our lives betrays that which we actually believe. It exposes the practical atheism of self-determination at all costs – most conspicuously – at the cost of communal safety, and most surreptitiously – at the expense of what it means to trust the One in whose care we are invited.
An ancient Psalm speaks to this directly:
Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
More Enigma Than Dogma 
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