Subject: What Will Reduce Gun Violence? Part 2: Return to Biblical Character Education

Jeremiah 31:33 “I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has publicly accused Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton of not only wanting to alter the Second Amendment but completely abolish it. In fact, Clinton’s policy advisor, Maya Harris, said Hillary Clinton believes the landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling ‘District of Columbia vs. Heller’, that upheld an individual’s right to own a gun, was “wrongly decided.”

In the ‘DC vs, Heller’ case, the District of Columbia had a longstanding ban on gun ownership which was challenged as unconstitutional because it violated the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court decided 5-4 that the Second Amendment “protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms”, saying that the right was “premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government.” The court said handguns are “arms” and may not be banned by the District of Columbia.

Why does it seem that Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment? She is a ‘left-wing’ politician, whose position is that humanity can only flourish when excessive differences in status, power and wealth are eliminated. Or, as the dictionary defines it, “”the radical, reforming, or socialist section of a political party or system.” Leftists believe the main cause of murders in America that involve a gun is the availability of guns. Clinton’s solution to curbing ‘gun violence’ is to take away the individual right to own a gun.

Trump is a ‘right-wing’ politician, which the dictionary defines as opposing socialism and social democracy. They include mainly conservatives and nationalists with a focus on individual rights and individual responsibility. While the Left would point to gun ownership as the root of the murder problem, the Right points to the morality of the gun owner as the root of the murder problem.

Columnist Dennis Prager sums up the opposing worldviews in his December 2012 article ‘Conscience, Not Guns’: “The moral values and the conscience of nations as well as individuals seem to play almost no role in the Left’s understanding of human behavior… the problem of gun violence in America is not the moral values of gun owners, it is gun ownership. And because Leftist thinking dominates American society — from elementary through graduate school and in virtually all the print and electronic news media — there is one view that almost never gets a hearing: that the primary reason for gun violence in America is not gun ownership, but the lack of a functioning moral conscience.”

In October 2015, President Obama said, “Our gun supply leads to more deaths. The GOP has no plausible alternative theory.” Of course there is an obvious answer – the best answer – which no one will talk about – and it is illuminated in our verse for this week. In the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, God tells the people that He will cause a complete change in a person’s conscience when He puts His law into their minds and writes it on their hearts. God called for a return to biblical morality – emphasizing character development and instruction in objective morality, so everyone knew the difference between right and wrong.

We could start with a simple set of ten instructions, if followed, improves the moral conscience of a society – the Ten Commandments. Could you imagine if every child was taught that: you must honor your parents (5th Commandment), don’t commit murder (#6), don’t commit adultery (#7), don’t steal (#8), don’t lie (#9), don’t lust after what someone else has (#10)? Does anyone seriously think this is injurious to people? Just the opposite is true – this simple set of instructions is the most profound moral code ever written.

But there is a reason why the Ten Commandments have been banned from our education system, They claim God, not man, is their author. Our verse this week says God wants to write them on our hearts. So God is indispensable to the Ten Commandments, as well as indispensable to knowing the difference between right and wrong. Without a higher authority than man, right and wrong are just personal opinions. But coming from God makes them objectively true.

So, how do we in America reduce gun violence? Return to where we were just a few decades ago before secular humanism dominated our culture. Instill biblical moral values in our youth, starting with the Ten Commandments. I haven’t heard this answer recommended to President Obama.