While U.S. public policy can positively (and negatively) impact the fires of conflict burning across the globe, it can also play a role in addressing violence in our own neighborhoods. One of the most pernicious and persistent dangers to public safety and community stability throughout the United States is gun violence, which kills 30,000 each year.
MCC service workers in Washington, D.C. have seen and heard this violence first hand. The MCC house in D.C. is located in the Trinidad neighborhood, which achieved notoriety last summer in the national and international press for a spate of gun violence. The most extreme event was a triple homicide, in which 35 semiautomatic shots were fired a mere three blocks from the MCC house.
Government is not responsible for these acts of violence; the men and women who pull the triggers bear that blame. But the availability of weapons to juveniles, the mentally ill and those with criminal records displays a failure of public policy.
Some policy changes, such as strengthening the ban on assault weapons that have no legitimate civilian purposes, are appropriate at the national level.
Other changes must happen at the state level. Two such reforms could be the implementation of a “one handgun per month” rule and a requirement that police be notified within 24 hours if a gun has been “lost or stolen.”
These two policy changes would be unobtrusive for most legitimate gun owners—few people need to purchase more than 12 handguns per year, and most gun owners want to report if their firearms are stolen—and they could save lives.
Many guns make their way from gun shops to the underground market by having a qualified “straw-man” buyer purchase a large quantity of guns and sell them for a profit to an illegal dealer. If the guns are used in a crime, the original buyer can claim that the guns were “lost or stolen,” avoiding all liability and remaining free to buy and sell new weapons. Enacting these common-sense laws could break this cycle.
And this cycle must be broken. As Luke 6:41–42 notes, we must first remove the log from our own eye before helping our neighbors remove specks from theirs. The United States has little legitimacy as a peacemaker abroad when it does not address violence at home.
