The Second Amendment: Why banning guns is not the answer (banning punitive parenting is)

I am a Christian conservative, as well a children's rights advocate, of the Christian dominionist type. I am pro-gun, in an anti-gun stance, due to being a Christian pacifist who does not want to, under any circumstance, take a human life. I value human life, but think modern-day calls for gun control are downright dangerous.

Why are extreme forms of gun control dangerous? According to GunPolicy.org, a left-leaning website that shows the gun policy nation-by-nation, states that there are approximately 200,000,000 to 300,000,000 guns in the United States. If we severely restrict gun purchases, all of the guns will go underground, and then we cannot regulate them. It is good instead to keep guns legal so we can regulate them, and thus so they don't fall into the wrong hands.

What can we do about the recent spike in mass shootings? Let's look at two countries with strict gun laws, and see how their rates of violent crime in general are faring. These two countries are Iceland and the United Kingdom. 

In the United Kingdom, where guns are pretty much banned, there still are mass knifings, and also knife fights. The rate of violent crime has not gone down in the UK. A few years back, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, proposed a law regulating knives. The violent crime problem in the UK is pretty bad.

In Iceland, the fastest growing form of violent crime is sex crimes, with all other forms of violence dwindling in terms of number of offenses. Sexual offenses usually come from a sexually repressed mindset, usually in sexually repressed environments, and so we can set that aside as spurious data. All other forms of violence against the person is pretty much non-existent. 

Most violence, except for sexual violence, is caused by the perpetrator experiencing violence as a child, thereby continuing an intergenerational cycle of violence. In Iceland, corporal punishment was banned in 2003, and was socially unacceptable since the late 1970s. In the UK, there is no ban on corporal punishment on the national level, and only Scotland and Wales have a legal ban on all corporal punishment. Corporal punishment still happens on a widespread societal level throughout the UK. 

Thus, the answer to gun violence is to not be a violent country at all. This means banning all punitive parenting, including corporal punishment. God's Law already prohibits all forms of punitive parenting towards children. It says in Colossians 3:21 KJV:

Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.

The Greek root word translated "provoke...to anger" is ερεθιζο (Latin: erethizo) and refers to damages or offenses, namely the slightest of personal offense perceived by a child, including, but not limited to, the slightest of offensive touch or speech perceived by the child, stemming from entitlement. This commandment was intended by the Apostle Paul, and understood in its original context, as a moral statute prohibiting all forms of punitive parenting, including any punishments or controlling demeanor towards children. In the Old Testament, punitive parents were put to death by way of bloodletting, after punishing their children one last time. Parents who punished their children were charged with kidnapping, with "kidnapping" being defined under the Law as the slightest of damages or offenses stemming from hostage-taking - child punishment was seen in biblical times as holding your child hostage merely for things they did wrong, thereby treating your child as a quartered slave. Paul here was lifting up this legal context in order to convict a group of Greek Christian parents who brought their pagan custom of spanking and punishing children into the church. Paul, contrary to popular legend, was anti-spanking, and opposed any and all punishment of a child.

The Second Amendment is here to stay. The root causes of violent crime have nothing to do with the availability of guns. No person simply comes up with the idea to buy a gun and shoot up a group of people. Usually, a mass shooter has a grudge, and that grudge is rooted in childhood trauma. Also, we have way too many guns in this country to even try and ban them all. Gun control just doesn't work. Instead, we need to look at the root causes of violence, and that requires more brains than it does to ban guns. 

The depraved and entitled parents who provoke their children to anger and raise a mass killer through punitive parenting will not inherit the Kingdom of God! Let them be forever cast into the lake of fire and burning sulfur, which is the second death prepared for Satan and his accomplices! Let them descend into the abyss which is the ever-burning Hell of fire and torment, suffering God's Wrath forever and ever! Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!