Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said this as his response to the massacre of children at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Connecticut : “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

According to Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who dedicate himself and his organization Sojourners to address social injustice, « That statement is at the heart of the problem of gun violence in America today — not just because it is factually flawed, which of course it is, but also because it is morally mistaken, theologically dangerous, and religiously repugnant. »

Jim, with whom I had the chance to dialogue on a number of occasions, gives the following exemple : « Rev. Phil Jackson, a young dynamic street pastor from Chicago told me that Chicago had 2,400 shootings in 2012 — 505 of them resulting in death. More than 100 of them were children from elementary to high school. Almost all of the murdered ones were people and children of color — African-American and Latino. That’s more gun deaths in Chicago than American troop deaths in Afghanistan last year. One city. »

Jim Wallis, “The NRA’s Dangerous Theology”, on www.sojourners.org, 17 January, 2013.