unPHILtered: The Way I See It (14 page)

It would seem to me that a criminal intent on robbing a house, raping a woman, or murdering someone would be less inclined to invade a house if he knew the occupants were armed. The only thing that keeps hard-core criminals at bay is not knowing if the people they’re about to try to harm are armed. They would be less inclined to come after you if they knew you had guns. It’s kind of like somebody saying they’re going to stop me on the side of the road and steal
everything from me. I think they’re going to leave me alone because they know I’m probably armed—and they would be correct in their assessment.

Unfortunately, evil has reared its ugly head too many times in America. On December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man named Adam Lanza murdered twenty elementary school students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. He killed his mother before attacking the school and then committed suicide when police arrived. It was the second-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history, after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, in which a student named Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people and wounded seventeen others in two attacks on the campus. On July 20, 2012, a former graduate student named James E. Holmes killed twelve people and wounded seventy others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

Look, evil people are going to do evil things, whether they have a gun or not. The Evil One has control over them and they’re going to kill, whether it’s with a high-powered rifle, bomb, knife, or poison. The worst school massacre in U.S. history occurred in Bath Township, Michigan, on May 18, 1927. Andrew Kehoe, a former school board treasurer, detonated two bombs that killed thirty-eight elementary school students and six adults. Kehoe was apparently upset that he’d lost a bid for reelection as town clerk and was losing his family’s farm through foreclosure. Remember the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders?
Someone murdered seven unsuspecting people by poisoning Tylenol capsules with cyanide. What’s the weapon of choice for terrorists in the Middle East? They invent ways of doing evil. They use aircraft, suicide bombers, and IEDs to do their carnage. Yeah, they use guns, too.

From the time the U.S. republic was founded, Americans have had a right to protect themselves and their loved ones, and being armed is the best defense against a criminal. Statistics show that people who are carrying guns legally, the ones who go to the local police station or sheriff’s office and go through a background check for concealed-carry permits, are far less likely to commit crimes than the general public. It would seem to me that if someone had been armed at the schools or movie theater where the shootings took place, the people who were killed might have had a better chance of survival. The men doing the killing are deranged. America needs to do a better job of punishing violent criminals and getting mental health help to those who need it. The mental health system in this country is an absolute embarrassment.

We already have gun-control measures in place in this country. Felons aren’t allowed to legally own guns. Children can’t own guns. It’s illegal for parents to leave a loaded gun where a child can find one, and it’s illegal to buy a gun for someone who isn’t supposed to have one. There are safety training
and permit requirements for owners. Have you thought about what our society would be like if Americans couldn’t legally own guns? The criminals would be emboldened because they’d know their would-be victims would be unarmed. There are more than three hundred million guns in private hands in our country, according to industry estimates. How would the federal government round them up if they were banned? Would they go door to door, searching everyone’s home for guns? It would be illegal and impractical to locate and seize them. The law-abiding citizens, the ones who use guns responsibly, might surrender their guns if it’s the law. But the criminals and evil people would only hide them from authorities, creating an environment that would be even worse. It would be utter chaos. It would be complete lawlessness, like it is in places like Afghanistan and Syria. Humanity would turn on itself so fast, and no one would be safe.

It’s what happened in a couple of cities that banned its residents from carrying handguns. In 1976, Washington, DC, imposed a law prohibiting its residents from carrying handguns and required all guns in homes to be either unloaded or stored with a trigger lock. By 1991, Washington was the nation’s murder capital with 479 murders in one year. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Washington’s handgun ban was unconstitutional in 2008. In 2012, Washington finished the year with fewer than one hundred murders for the first time since 1963. Likewise, Chicago instituted a handgun ban in 1982, and its murder rate
soared to 936 deaths in 1992. Chicago’s gun ban was invalidated by a U.S. circuit court of appeals in 2010.

Stricter gun-control laws won’t work because criminals will still find ways to get their hands on guns illegally, and law-abiding citizens will be left defenseless. Look what happened during Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s—no one stopped drinking and crime only got worse.

Statistics show that limiting the populace’s access to guns won’t necessarily cause murder rates to decline. In 1960, there were about 4.3 guns for every ten Americans. The number of murders by firearms was 5.1 per one hundred thousand residents. It is estimated that there are now 310 million firearms in America—more than there are actual citizens—and there were 3.6 murders by firearms per one hundred thousand residents in 2010, according to the most recent statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control. So even though the number of guns in America more than quadrupled, the murder rate declined.

I have to admit that I do find it remarkably ironic that many of the people who want to control guns are also pro-choice advocates when it comes to abortion. Many of the same people who want to rid the U.S. of guns are advocating for the murder of millions of babies. It’s pretty incredible to me that in one breath they’re advocating for abortion, while in the next breath they’re saying, “Boy, if we could just do something about these guns, think about how the murder rate would go down.” It’s absolute nonsense. In 2010, there were more than seven hundred thousand
abortions performed at clinics that report to the CDC. A report published by the National Right to Life Committee in 2011 estimated there were more than 54 million abortions performed in America since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973
Roe v. Wade
ruling. We have lost more Americans to murder through abortion than through all the wars we have ever fought. It’s embarrassing and a terrible blight on all of us. Fortunately, the blood of Jesus is more than sufficient to forgive those who have committed the act.

As I wrote in my first book, it’s amazing to me that it’s more difficult to kill a duck in this country than it is to rip an unborn child out of its mother’s womb. Where I live in eastern Louisiana, I can hunt only sixty days each year. The government tells me how many ducks I can kill, and I can shoot only so many of each species. I can kill six ducks per day, but I can never be in possession of more than twelve ducks at once. We’re talking about ducks. Abortion clinics are open year-round, some of them six days a week. It’s open season on babies. The financial cost of an abortion averages somewhere between $430 and $1,500, depending on at what point in the pregnancy it occurs. In California, nurse-practitioners, nurse-midwives, and physician assistants can even perform early abortions now. You don’t even have to be a doctor to do it. It’s that easy—and it’s criminal.

One of the big questions in the abortion debate revolves around the viability of a fetus to survive outside of its mother’s womb. Science has determined for years that a new individual human being begins at fertilization, when the sperm and ovum meet to form a single cell. Psalm 139:13 tells us:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
What the pro-choice advocates are really doing is trying to play God to determine when a baby has a life of its own. Some people suggest a fetus isn’t viable at nineteen weeks, but that it is at twenty-two weeks and shouldn’t be aborted then. Are you kidding me? You’re going to decide whether to abort a baby based on three weeks’ time? That is brutality. It is heartless, faithless, and senseless.

One of the definitions of
viable
in
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary
is: “capable of living or of developing into a living thing.” I know this sounds weird, America, but is
sin
still in the dictionary? Ask your mother when she knew she was pregnant with you. She’s going to tell you, “I knew it was you the entire time,” because she’s a mother. God knows us before He forms us in the womb. As it says in Jeremiah 1:5:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
The doctors, legislators, and judges are trying to put themselves in God’s shoes and decide who’s going to live.

It’s spiritual warfare. We need to turn our country around, but only time will tell. In the meantime, we have to love them,
instruct them, show them the way, show them the truth, show them the life, show them the resurrection, show them Jesus, and pray for them. They’re being led down a road they should not travel by the depraved. They’re like sheep without a shepherd. They’ve gone astray, so we must show them and tell them the Good News.

H
ave you ever looked closely at a watermelon seed? It’s black, flat, and weighs nearly nothing. You could easily hold one on the tip of your finger. But if you throw a watermelon seed into sandy dirt and water it a few times each week, it’s truly amazing what happens next. The first thing you’ll see is a vine running across the ground. Then you’ll start to see flowers with swollen buds, and before too long you’ll begin to see round melons that will eventually multiply in weight five thousand times over what the seed weighed. When the watermelon becomes ripe and you bust it open, its skin is green, its rind is usually pale green or white, and its flesh is the prettiest red you’ll ever see. Now ask yourself:
How did all that color come from a tiny black seed?

And what about acorns? You don’t even have to plant them. They fall to the ground from oak trees, and a new oak tree will actually sprout from the ground where the acorn was. That tree will grow to be fifty feet tall and live for hundreds of years. The acorn weighs less than an ounce, but it turns into something that weighs tons. If you cut down an oak tree, its wood is so strong and durable that you can use it to build a house or furniture. And it came from that tiny acorn that fell to the ground. Now ask yourself:
How did something that small grow to become something so big?

How does a tiny seed turn into a watermelon or an acorn into an oak tree? There’s only one conclusion—there is tremendous power at work to make it happen. Humans can’t do that. We can’t touch it. This amazing transformation is living proof of the resurrection. Something dies (totally ceases to be what it was) when it goes into the ground, and we simply watch what happens next. Every day we witness the resurrection of living things all around us. The fact that something so small as acorns and watermelon seeds ends up growing into something so big defies all logic.

Everything we see around us in nature points to God’s majesty and breathtaking creative ability. Only God can create something out of nothing. We know He’s here based on what He has made (that’s the assertion made in Romans 1:20). Based on just a paltry look at two examples out of literally millions that could be made, I’m convinced the only explanation for the cause
of the world in which we live is an all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing, and loving God.

Another example? Look closely at the honeycomb. It is made of rows and rows of individual cells that are the perfect shape of a hexagon. What’s so special about that? Engineers will tell you that the hexagon is a strong, rigid shape, capable of holding much weight. So how did the honeybee know to build its comb out of hexagons instead of squares, rectangles, or triangles—which would have collapsed under the weight of honey? Hey, have you ever looked at a honeybee’s head? It’s all eyes—there’s not a lot of room in there for brains.