Why I Don’t Give Money to Beggars

I don’t give money to beggars holding cardboard signs on the medians of our roadways.  I don’t drop coins into the paper cups of disabled veterans outside of the ballpark.  I don’t give out cash to transients looking for a tank of gas coming to my office at church.

It is difficult to say this out loud.  I can’t escape Jesus’ words; “Give to everyone who begs from you ….”(Matthew 5:42, Luke 6:30).  His call to compassion for the beggar is unequivocal.  And my response is full of qualifications.  I want to follow his teachings.  I want to follow his example.  But as with his insistence that “…if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off….” (Matthew 5:30, 18:8) I don’t take his begging admonition literally. 

I was introduced to institutional begging during my college sophomore year in India.  It has framed my response ever since.  Entire families make their living begging on the streets and in the market places of that wonderful country.   Both Hinduism and Islam require alms-giving as a practice of their daily faith.  Beggars hang outside of Temples and Mosques taking advantage of this practice which has all the best intentions of compassion for the poor.  Professional adult beggars will mutilate their children to increase their earning potential for the family unit.  During our orientation classes in Bangalore we learned from social workers that giving money to beggars only perpetuates a system of class oppression.  Education, investment in self-development businesses and a commitment to build relationships with those who beg were the solution to this dehumanizing practice.

Such a context may seem alien to our North American experience but only at first glance.   Handing a few dollars to the one holding the cardboard sign by the side of the road, dropping a few coins in a cup is designed to make us the donor feel good…benevolent…superior. Those invested in begging count on that.   Such charity does little to move a suffering individual to wholeness.  At best it provides a temporary Band-Aid.

I’d be the first to say that if you’re bleeding, a Band-Aid is important.  I have friends who for each baseball game they attend bring a number of sack lunches with healthy food to distribute to the long line of beggars outside the gates.  Awesome!   

When a transient comes to church looking for money for food, I personally take them out to lunch or to the grocery store and pay their bill.  When they come looking for money for a tank of gas, I drive with them to the gas station and pay for a full tank.  I don’t lecture or proselytize in such an encounter.  I try to listen to their story and affirm their humanity.  If they are local I refer them to organizations that can assist them to work towards self-sufficiency, if that is their goal.  If they are just passing through I bless their journey.   

But dropping a dollar in a cup doesn’t involve a conversation or an encounter with a human being.  It’s designed to be convenient and detached for the donor.  Is that what Jesus had in mind?   He sets his admonition about begging in the verses about “turning the other cheek,” “going the second mile,” “lending to any in need of borrowing,” “praying for our enemies.” Vulnerability, openness and connection between human beings were his call.  Was it the pious convenience of quick and easy charity? 

My bias is to serve our local food bank/direct assistance non- profit agency; “the safety net” for our community’s poor and frail elderly.  Along with other members of our church I have been on the Board of Directors of the Community Service Agency of Mt. View, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills for years.  (I have worked with similar agencies throughout my 37 year ordained ministry.) Our Alpha Omega Homeless program assists the transition to decent housing and economic self-sufficiency for an average of 350 people each year.  When we distribute food and/or emergency PG&E or rent monies to those facing hunger and potential homelessness we do so with trained social workers developing a plan towards self-sufficiency for our clients.  We work with them in an on-going relationship.   Dignity in such a process is one of our highest priorities as an agency.

What dignity is there for the person begging on the side of the road when we drop in a few coins and just pass on by?

Years ago, Bonnie Bollwinkel worked as an outreach social worker finding veterans in “single occupancy housing” who had lost their connection to the government assistance they earned defending our country.  She knew them by name and they knew hers as they called out to her while she walked the streets of that city’s “skid row.” The program in which she worked would assist scores of veterans to resource the next steps in their lives.   

Jesus didn’t intend for almsgiving to be an exercise in convenient piety for the donor but a spiritual practice in which we participate in God’s promise that someday all will have enough, all will be treated with dignity and all will have a safe place to call home (Luke 4:18-19).

I won’t give money to beggars.   I will contribute to the team/community effort it takes to restore a life.

Fifty Shades of Grace #5

Following the death of the Boston Marathon terrorist Tsarnaey, a great controversy arose about his place of burial.  No community wanted the remains of this despised individual in their cemetery out of shear hatred and out of fear of reprisals, vandalism and negative attention.

Ultimately, a Muslim cemetery in Virginia was willing to bury his remains, the logistics of which were organized surprisingly by a Christian woman.

Martha Mullen is a mental health counselor and a United Methodist seminary graduate (United, Dayton, Ohio).  Hearing about the controversy over the radio she sent emails to various faith organizations to see what could be done.  She heard back from Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which arranged for a funeral plot at the Al-Barzakh cemetery.  "It was an interfaith effort," she said (CBS/AP 05/13/13).

A variety of local groups have protested the decision from which they were excluded and uniformed until it was a done deal.  Ms. Mullen has faced significant vitriol and threats as a result.

"I can't pretend it's not difficult to be reviled and maligned," Martha Mullen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday.  "But any time you can reach across the divide and work with people that are not like you, that's what God calls us to do...My first thought was Jesus said love your enemies," she said.

Mullen, a member of the United Methodist Church, said she was motivated by her own faith and that she had the full support of her pastor.

"Nobody is without sin," she said.  "Certainly this was a horrific act, but he's dead and what happened is between him and God.  We just need to bury his body and move forward. People were making an issue and detracting from the healing that needed to take place."

Whether one agrees with this action or how it was made, the objective will marvel at the courage and convictions of Martha Mullen.  To offer grace and dignity to one who did not earn it, to act with compassion to one who showed none to thousands of others, to risk scorn and personal safety to stand up for one's beliefs, is Christ-like indeed. 

Violence Breeds Violence

Do the video game industry, media and movies cause violence?  The debate rages over the impact of our entertainment choices as they affect our behavior with gun violence. 

Our culture is saturated with violent images, yet the vast majority of people do not act on such as motivation.  Even those who are armed do not.  For example, in the US in 2009 there were an estimated 310 million non-military firearms (CNN, 09/09/12), and 326,090 firearm incidents* (factcheck.org).  That is .0015 firearm incidents per gun.

The US is not uniquely violent.  Our 4.5% of the world’s population owns 40% of all non-military firearms (Huffington Post, 12/20/12, Joe Van Brussel).  Yet our overall rates of per capita violence are similar to Australia, Canada and Western Europe, other than homicide.  There are nations with worse per capita rates for gun homicide:  Mexico, South Africa and Colombia for example (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).  Japan’s movie and animated literature industry is one of the most graphically violent in the world, and yet, as a society, its rates of violent crime are some of the lowest.

Rather than the media/movie industry causing violence in our culture, I would suggest our culture’s attitude towards violence is what fuels its expression in our media.

We hold a deeply ingrained cultural conviction that violence can solve our problems, and we find fictional depiction of that conviction entertaining.

The “good guy” shoots the “bay guy” and walks away having saved the day and securing possibilities for the future.  We dilute the impact and terror of violence by reducing it to cartoon images.  Our movies and video games present violence in ways we can manage; giving us the illusion that it can be controlled at some level, or that it has some enduring meaning.  We want to believe that violence can have a redeeming purpose, as ugly and brutal as it might be.  So we act it out in our media/artistic/entertainment expressions in safe and stylized ways.

Haven't humans done so since the dawn of history?  Europeans have been doing so since the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (5th century BCE); primal people did so around the evening fire; our youth do so today watching it on screens, big and small.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Rehearsing violence and our response to it may allow us vicarious and safe ways to express the anger and fear that go with it.  But as rational as such behavior may seem for the survival of a community, in the end that is not how violence works.  

Violence destroys, demeans and ruins the both victim and the perpetrator at one level or another.  Singular acts of violence may be necessary for self-defense or preservation but "the good guy" never just walks away from it; the increasing rates of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and suicide in our armed forces after ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan may be indicative.   

Nations may have no choice but to use deadly force to defend or survive, but victory rarely guarantees peace; it may buy a period of the cessation of violence, but by definition that is not "peace."  Attempts to make violence palatable are inherently false, misleading and spiritually bankrupt.

We go and pay our entertainment money to see/hear/or play at violence only if we have disconnected the reality of violence from our psyche, our souls.  Such compartmentalization may be an effective defense mechanism.  It may be a necessary defense mechanism.  But there is a cost to pay for it.

In response to the recent exchange of rocket violence between the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and Israel, US President Barack Obama said in Israel's defense, "There's no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."  (11/19/12)

This is an astonishing statement from the executive of a government doing just that with robotic drone aircraft.

The New America Foundation estimates that in Pakistan, between 1,953 and 3,279 people have been killed by drones since 2004, and that between 18% and 23% of them were not militants. The nonmilitant casualty rate was down to about 10% in 2012, the group says.  In Yemen, the group estimates between 646 and 928 people have been killed in a combination of drone strikes and airstrikes, and 623 to 860 of those killed were militants.  Only about 2% of those killed have been high-level targets, the group said (CNN, 02/10/13).

We are at war against a real and determined enemy to be sure.  There are certainly going to be collateral victims.  We can be confident that our military forces go out of their way, even putting themselves in danger, to limit such collateral losses.  The citizens of our country, myself included, do not want to see our uniformed men and women take casualties, and drones can always be replaced.  Drones are effective war machines, getting to locations other assets couldn't.

And.

We absolutely are asking other countries to tolerate our missiles raining down on their citizens from the sky.

I have to imagine that you can only do that if you've been able somewhere psychologically, spiritually, emotionally to disconnect the realities of such violence from the intentions of your actions.  I imagine that a President can only make such a statement as President Obama did last November while authorizing violence on other countries by disconnecting the realities of such violence from one's mind. 

Jesus says, "Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword." (Matthew 26:52)  

Violence may at times be necessary, but it is always an evil, and it rarely solves our problems.  There will never be enough targeted assignations or armed guards at schools to keep us safe.  You can't kill enough "bad guys" to be safe.

Violence only breeds more violence.  When will we invest ourselves in the peacemaking?

*Use of a firearm in an act of crime or suicide

Fifty Shades of Grace # 4

Mike Liguori is a former United States Marine and veteran of the Iraq War. In his book, “The Sandbox, Stories of Human Spirit and War,” he describes his two tours in Iraq (’04-‘06) and his struggle coming home.  Mr. Liguori battled Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and struggled finding a purpose in life after war.

Mike Liguori

In a recent panel interview on KQED Public radio (03.13.13, 9:00am Forum) marking the tenth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, Mike Liguori described how he grew up in San Carlos as an active Roman Catholic with a typical adolescent machismo attitude toward life and war.  He went into the military with heroic visions of defending his nation and retribution for the attacks of 9/11.  His first experience of live fire battle changed all of that.  In fact, he was describing it and his service in Iraq as a “loss of faith”…in his nation, himself and God.    

Following his discharge from the service he bounced around a variety of jobs and schools with little success or focus.  He experienced so much of what we are learning about Iraq/Afghanistan PTSD; serious issues with anger, isolation, alcohol.  One night as he was fixing dinner alone in his apartment, he contemplated suicide, using the knife he had in his hands.  It was at that moment that he heard a voice speak clearly to him as if someone was in the room with him; “…this is not your time to die”.  It was a turning point in his life and a moment that he credits to God as he understands God.   

In 2011, Mike graduated with a B.S. in Business Management and Administration from Menlo College.  He is the founder of Operation Work Warriors, a non-profit organization helping veterans reintegrate into civilian life by providing education, counseling and career guidance (www.operationworkwarriors.org).  He is active in the veteran’s community, lobbying veteran legislation in Washington D.C. with the Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).  He is a public speaker about hiring veterans in today’s workforce; our nation’s unemployment rate is 7.7% but for veterans it is 9.4%.  President Obama was recently quoted as saying, “No one who fights for their country overseas should ever have to fight for a job here at home.” (Washington Post, 03.19.13)  Operation Work Warriors is about honoring those who serve our country with the dignity and respect that comes with honest work and a chance to build a future.

However one understands the Easter story…history or metaphor…life by its nature is organized for resurrection.  A seed dies and springs to life with new growth in its season.  Every day our bodies replace old cells die as they die with new cells.  And it can happen in the life of any good man or woman who finds themselves with the second chance to choose life and make the most of it.  For Mike Liguori, resurrection came as he buried the illusions of the past and dedicated his life to doing something good for somebody else.  Service to others has renewed his faith in a Higher Power, a compassionate God who cares about him and his future.  And he would tell you that such faith has made all the difference.

Movies and Music

The final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is referred to as the “Ode to Joy” (1824).  Beethoven was inspired by Friedrich Schiller's poem of that title dedicated to the joy of "universal brotherhood" (1785).  The poem was written prior to the upheaval of the French Revolution (1789-99), one of the first results of Europe's embrace of popular democracy.  Following the Renaissance, Europeans began to see divine authority within the individual rather than in elite institutions of royal hierarchy.  There was great hope in the prospect of the common person’s future versus the past of monarchy.  One can hear the theme of universal brotherhood in France’s national motto born in the Revolution:  “Equality.  Fraternity.  Liberty.”

Beethoven was empathetic to these ideals.  The French Revolution impacted Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica” (1804, “eroica” = “heroic” in Italian).  It was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte whom the composer saw as a heroic champion of democracy.  When Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor of France, Beethoven renounced him and tore off the title page of his symphony.  Like many of the intelligentsia of the day, Beethoven hoped for a democratic future minus the poverty, hypocrisy and militarism of a society governed by royalty.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

As the Revolution matured, Beethoven’s hope for society’s future did as well.  He looked for an opportunity to set Schiller’s poem to music.  The connection of his fourth movement to the “Ode to Joy” is a strong statement of Beethoven’s intention to see a future of "universal brotherhood" and peace.

Many consider the 9th Symphony to be Beethoven’s greatest piece of work, if not one of the greatest of all time.  For example, on Christmas Day in 1989, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of the Germanys and the end of the Soviet Union, Leonard Bernstein led an international orchestra in performing Beethoven’s 9th.  The moment was a celebration of "joy", "freedom" and "universal brotherhood" in the hope for peace.

Consider then that the trailer for the hit movie A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) shows a series of car explosions, murders and general mayhem set to the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.  Linking the “Ode to Joy” to images of violence and death…even Hollywood’s theatrical violence and death…is the height of irony, to say the least.

Scene from A Good Day to Die Hard

The musical settings of film can be powerful and inspiring.

Director Philip Haufman and music director Bill Conti set a fan dancer's burlesque to Claude Debussy's "Claire de Lune" ("Moonlight", 1893) in the movie The Right Stuff (1983) about the beginnings of the U.S. manned space program.  Conti would win the Academy Award for best musical score for the film.  A strip tease danced to such a classical masterpiece entitled "Moonlight" as the test pilots considered the privileges that the fates had brought them to be the first Mercury astronauts seems genius.

In the 1986 Academy Award winning Best Picture, Platoon director Oliver Stone and music director Georges Delerue chose the passionate crescendo of "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber (1936) in the pivotal assignation scene as one U.S. Army Sergeant shoots another in the back, one of Stone's hints to America's betrayal of itself in the Vietnam War.

Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" (1880), a tribute to Russia's resistance against Napoleon's invasion and eventual defeat beginning at the battle of Borodino (1812), is now played at scores of July 4th fireworks displays for the noise of its cannonade finale, with little consideration of its historical context.  Movie makers have so overused this great piece of music that it has become clichéd.  Yet in V for Vendetta (2005), director James McTeigue and music director Dario Marianelli use the "1812" quite appropriately for their climactic conclusion scene as the British Parliament Building in London is blown up with spectacular special effects fulfilling the intention of the Guy Fawkes’ failed gunpowder plot (1605).  As the Russians in Tchaikovsky's time succeeded in fighting off their oppressor, celebrating with cannons and ringing church bells in salute, the film makers of V for Vendetta wanted to suggest that their fictional hero was successful in resisting the tyranny of anti-democratic government.

Final scene from V for Vendetta

Church folk know the spiritual impact when music speaks to transcendent themes.  Music is the heart and soul of what we call communal worship.  Sacred music connects us to something beyond ourselves and the ideals of hope, faith and love.  Music can evoke real emotion and inspire great ideas when theme and context are matched.  We know that in ballet, opera and the theater, rock concerts, street minstrels and church choirs.  That's even true in the movies. 

Which may be one reason it is so glaring when cinema artists purposely choose not to do so.  Director John Moore and music director Marco Beltrami's choice to use Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in the trailer for A Good Day to Die Hard is insulting on so many levels.  Along with Beltrami's resume of scoring horror films, he was also nominated twice for Academy Awards (Hurt Locker and 3:10 to Yuma).  Certainly he knew what he was doing when he juxtaposed "Ode to Joy" to movie cartoon violence?

Does it matter?  Do we the moviegoers even care?  Have we become so accustomed to cartoon violence in film that the music behind it is irrelevant?  Does it take an amateur's appreciation of classical music and an entitled sense of self-importance to be thus offended?

Or does the misuse of one of the great European contributions of music, a tribute to human hope for a world of peace and joy, in A Good Day to Die Hard speak to the continual numbing of our culture to violence?  To date (03/12/13) this "shoot em up" film which cost $92 million to produce has grossed over $240 million globally.  Maybe the answer to that question is in the numbers.

Fifty Shades of Grace #3

The studio had been collecting dust for 20 years or so.  It is a real challenge to do pottery on your own when it is hard to walk, when the strength in your arms is gone.  The tools, kiln and wheel were all in good shape.  Boxes of glaze materials were lined up in order, oxides in their jars.  Bags of clay had long since dried into 25 lb. bricks but could be revived with water and effort.  There was a Voulkos poster on the wall along with a cartoon depicting the choice between one's studio and one's spouse; as if there could be one!

Audrey died at 92.  But one never stops being a potter once you've caught the fever.  For the last decade we had been friends and fellow pilgrims.  We spoke of family, politics, friends, history and pottery, always pottery.  It was part of our bond.  As her family prepared her home for the estate sale they asked if I would come by and take anything I wanted from her studio before it all disappeared.  They wanted me to have first choice.  It would mean a lot to them.  It would mean a lot to me.

As I rummaged through the stuff of a lifetime it became clear that there was more there than the remnants of a "hobby."   I hate that word applied to ceramic art.  Webster defines "hobby" as "an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation."  That one doesn't sell one's pottery for a living or get paid to teach it, or even if your proficiency doesn't reach the level of craft, it doesn't mean that what you are doing with clay is not "art":  "The expression of a transcendent moment of creativity."  You don't learn how to mix your own glazes, fire your own kiln, crush and knead your own material and hang a Peter Voulkos poster on your wall for a "hobby" for crying out loud!  Audrey found pleasure and relaxation in the clay, certainly.  But there was so much more than that. 

You could see it in her pieces.  The family had organized those left in storage on a table top.  They were all about the same size.  You could see what weight of clay she had grown confident in centering. 

You could see it in the dusty tools left behind.  Batik stamps, dental tools, seed pods, patches of fabric and children's toys all used to decorate, all used to record discovery in the clay.

You could see it in the score of dried out glaze buckets, the residue of experiment.

Each simple piece of pottery now organized on a dusty table reflected a texture tried, a stamp imprinted, a variance in glaze and the journey an artist was making to find her voice.

This housewife, farmer, historian, nature-loving mother/grandmother found in clay a medium for her moments of transcendent creativity.  It drew her to the solitude of her studio where her reservoirs were filled again and again.  That her pieces had no price tags, that her resume listed no exhibits or awards, made her no less an artist than the few whose names we remember.

I saw my own process in hers.  The same process for most potters I imagine.  I thought of the day when my kids have to organize my own dusty studio, scratching their heads over what to do with tools and equipment and books and boxes of stuff I found invaluable.  I suppose they will find it a hassle to dispose of such stuff and the memories that go with it.  But they will know, as my friends do of their mom, that clay was one of the ways a potter finds some peace in this world and within.

In spite of their insistence that I have "first choice," the only thing I could take from the table was a perfect tiny bowl made by my friend.  It will go in my collection next to the Hamada, the Ferguson and the Leach that my kids will have to find a home for after I am gone.  But the Audrey is as much a treasure as any other.

A Pastor’s Plea about Guns and Suicide

Something is getting lost in the national debate about gun violence in our country.  As horrific as those occasions of mass killings at schools or in public places are, statistically they are very rare.  Workplace violence and street crime are far more likely the occasion for firearm homicide.  But the largest effect of gun availability is suicide.

Two-thirds of all gun-related deaths in the US are suicides (2010 saw 30,470 gun-related deaths: 19,392 or 63% suicide; 11,078 or 36.4% homicide).₁ Guns remain the most common method of suicide (50.7% of suicides in 2006 were gun-related).₂

The US, with 4.5% of the world’s population, owns 40% of the world’s civilian firearms.  But the US is not uniquely violent.  Our overall rates of per capita violence are similar to Australia, Canada and Western Europe other than homicide.  There are nations with worse per capita rates for gun homicide:  Mexico and Colombia for example.  Compared to other developed countries, the US death by firearm rate of 10.2 per 100,000 is highest in the world.  Finland is second with 4.47 per 100,000.₃ The difference is in part the wide spread availability of guns in the United States.  Dr. Garen Winemute, University of California Medical Center, Davis, was recently quoted saying, “That’s the weapons effect.  It’s not clear that guns cause violence but it’s absolutely clear that they change the outcome”.₄

That’s especially true with suicide.

Over 38,000 people in the US die by suicide every year.  A person dies by suicide about every 14 minutes in the US.  90% of all people who die by suicide have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder at the time of their death.  There are four male suicides for every female suicide but three times as many females as males attempt suicide.  Men are far more likely to use a gun.  Although most gun owners reportedly keep a firearm in their home for “protection” or “self-defense”, 83% of gun related deaths in these homes are a result of a suicide, often by someone other than the gun owner.₂

There are an estimated 8-25 attempted suicides for every suicide death.₂  The use of a gun changes the outcome of the attempt dramatically.  Those attempting suicide with means other than guns often fail and are given a second chance in recovery from the attempt.  The devastating effect of a gun rarely fails.

Gun availability is a risk factor for suicide especially for youth in the US who often attempt suicide on impulse.  If they attempt with a gun, usually a handgun, they are more than likely to succeed in comparison to other suicide means.  Adolescents who commit suicide with a gun overwhelmingly use guns owned by their parents or other family members.  In one study in the Northwest, 90% of teen suicides were from guns, 5% from drug overdoses [or] cutting and piercing (the second most common means of attempted teen suicide).  Statistically those states with more guns per capita have more deaths by suicide.  Gun owners do not have more mental health problems than non-owners nor are they more suicidal than non-owners.   The difference is that more guns are available.  The availability of suicide method has a huge impact on the rate of successful attempts.  If there is a gun available the likelihood of suicide dramatically increases for those considering suicide as an option.₅

It is not that guns cause suicide but that they dramatically change the outcome.

The vast majority of gun owners in the United States are law-abiding people experienced in the safe handling of firearms.  They grieve every loss to gun violence, every mass murder victim.  They don’t want the criminal or insane to get their hands on guns any more than those who don’t own guns.

It is incumbent upon gun owners to safely secure their weapons, especially if they have teenagers or frail elderly in the home.  Trigger locks, home gun safes or vaults or local storage at shooting range lockers are essential for the safety of those at home.  If you choose to have guns in your home, teaching young people the safe use and care of firearms is paramount.  

Such an admonition may seem patronizing or trite coming from a preacher who chooses not to own guns.  But I’ve hunted.  I’ve enjoyed the firing range.  I learned a lot in one of California’s “Hunter Safety Courses”.  I’ve associated with gun owners throughout my life who hold safety as their top priority.  I honor those men and women in uniform who arm themselves to defend our community and nation.

And.  I have had family members go through clinical depression and suicidal episodes.   God forbid that they would choose using a gun at their homes to end their lives before seeking help.

As a volunteer police Chaplain in Clovis, California it was my responsibility to make “death notifications” to residents when family members died.  Delivering the news of a suicide, especially by gun, brings with it overwhelming pain and shock to survivors that leaves their lives forever changed. 

As a pastor, twice I have talked men out of killing themselves with guns.  I don’t want to ever do it again.

If we are going to continue to be a nation with wide availability and access to firearms, the cost of suicide by gun must be taken into the equation.

₁      National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, 2010

₂      American Foundation for Suicide Prevention quoting NCHS/CDC 2010

₃      United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

₄      Huffington Post, 12/20/12, Joe Van Brussel citing

₅      Harvard Injury Control Research Center, Harvard School of Public Health