Beating Guns
By
Shane Clairborne & Michael Martin

 

 

A new book has been added to Plymouth's library:  Beating Guns – Hope for People Who are Weary of Violence: by Shane Clairborne & Michael Martin. The word Beating here refers to the author (Michael) using his blacksmith skills to beat guns into “farm tools and other lovely things”. "These two authors offer a clarion call to change our hearts regarding one of the most significant moral issues of our time" – the place of guns in our lives, homes, and cities.

 

Did you know

• More Americans have died from guns in the US in the last fifty years than in all the wars of American History
• Though the people of the United States total 5% if the worlds population they own almost half the world’s guns.
• American has the world's most gun deaths –
  • 105 per day or about 38,000 per year (2019) 
  • 123 per day or about 45,222 per year (2022)

 In a time when sound bites for and against guns are recycled over and over, this book brings volumes of facts to the discussion.  Its bias is to speak to people of faith and their relationship to guns but not only to faith communities, rather to all communities.
 
Something has gone terribly wrong for some Christians when:

• The safety on their gun has three settings: Peace, War, God wills it.
• When a man who lost a bible quoting contest shoots and kills the man who won. The scripture was about forgiveness
• A Christian university (>100,000 students) offers free course to qualify for a concealed carry permit. It has spent 3 million dollars to build a 500 acre state of the art shooting range to facilitate this endeavor.

Something has gone wrong in our society when:

• Marriage portraits increasingly include the loving couple holding her and his guns
• 72% of spousal murders occur using guns
• Of all children (1m to 14 years) killed by guns in the industrialized countries, 87% are US children.
• Firearms were the leading cause of non-disease death for U.S. children and adolescents for the first time in 2020

 
This book is filled with the history of guns in the US and the absurd outcomes of their use that have become so common place BUT it also provides common sense ideas to make our homes, cities, and nation safer. It provides those of Christian faith a strong voice to counter the rising white Christian nationalist gun preversion of the Gospel.  
 
Brenda Salter McNeil
As a black woman, mother, and reconciler who has witnessed countless parents losing their children to gun violence, one of my greatest concern is to find a way to stop this senseless loss of life. That is why I highly recommend this timely, relevant and necessary book.