c. 1998 Religion news Service

(Tom Ehrich is the author of”On a Journey,”daily meditations available through Journey Publishing Co. If you have feedback or want to suggest a question for a future column, e-mail him at journey(AT)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ It’s time to rewrite the gun lobby’s bumper sticker.

The usual patter is something like:”Guns don’t kill people, criminals do.”Flood the streets with weapons. If a few get into the hands of bad guys, well, that’s the price of freedom.

Tell that to the students in Springfield, Ore., who watched a disturbed classmate open fire in the school cafeteria. To them, a better slogan might be:”He took arms against his troubles, and now our friends are dead.” No, gun merchants did not cause the anger that pervades American life, they’ve just found a way to profit from it.”Arm the angry,”the bumper sticker should read.”Arm the fearful.”Or”Why should Middle Eastern terrorists be the only ones who can walk into a crowded room and hose down anonymous victims?” Somehow, I don’t think we’ll hear anyone argue that Kipland Kinkel, the 15-year-old alleged gunman, was one of those ballyhooed”sportsmen”whose gun-toting rights the National Rifle Association proclaims. But, should anyone make a connection between a boy’s acting out of rage and the semiautomatic rifle in his hands, we surely will hear the usual pieties about free trade.

Free-enterprise pieties are a smokescreen, of course. Selling guns isn’t a noble act of commerce any more than hawking addictive tobacco to 12-year-olds is an expression of American freedom. The bumper sticker should read:”Greedy, and proud of it.” Or the NRA will trot out the Constitution. Maybe the”right to bear arms”does mean putting a pistol on the seat of that angry driver in the next lane. Maybe we want our neighbors to express their day-to-day annoyance by packing heat. The bumper sticker could read:”Mow your lawn too early, and you’re dead meat.” A truly honest bumper sticker would read:”Washington: bought, sold and paid for.”How is it the federal government can find millions to harass a maker of computer software, but shrugs helplessly at the arming and drugging of America? Should Bill Gates be making larger campaign contributions?

Or maybe the government’s selective lethargy is something as simple as:”Easy targets: we love ’em.” What we need, of course, is for the lawyers to find a way to turn armed mayhem into fat fees. What pioneering attorney will follow the causal chain and file suit against the manufacturer of the rifle with which Kinkel allegedly shot his schoolmates? Why should anti-tobacco lawyers get all the action?

But enough bumper-sticker sarcasm. Let’s get serious. How many school shootings will it take before we rethink our hands-off attitude toward gun merchants? I can’t think of a single constitutional privilege or foundational freedom that requires an armed populace.

Yes, Kinkel was an angry boy, and, no doubt, he had cause for his anger. Many of us get angry. Some stay angry. The point isn’t anger. The point is the semiautomatic rifle he held in his hands. Its bullets are what tore into students’ flesh.

A friend says the boy’s father figured his son would get a gun anyway, so why not give him one and hope he would learn to respect its firepower? Behind that reasoning is the reality that an out-of-control gun market probably would have found a way to arm the boy.

We can’t expect arms merchants to police themselves. There’s too much money to be made arming the fearful, angry, cruel and impotent. At some point, the citizenry must ask: Do we really believe our nation is better off with semiautomatic weapons in our hands? Does our commonweal require free trade in”cop-killer”bullets?

It comes back to us. When gunfire rages in our children’s schools, we pay attention. That’s what turned the tide against tobacco. When it was our parents dying from emphysema and lung cancer, our children hacking at the breakfast table, we had a change of heart.

We’ve had three national-focus school shootings thus far in 1998. (That doesn’t count the inner-city shootings that have stopped making headlines.) What will be the threshold _ one a week?

At some point, our suburban escapes and rural icons will display as much violence as the inner cities we try to avoid. Maybe then we will have had enough.

IR END EHRICH