Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor, a teacher, a Tae Kwon Do Master Instructor, and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has practicing tae kwon do and pondering the mysteries of light.
When I was in college, way back in the early 2000s, some friends of mine convinced me that we should all take a Tae Kwon Do class for PE credit. Little did I know that I was making a decision that would shape the rest of my life. I took to the art quickly and immediately fell in love with it. I have now been practicing tae kwon do for almost 20 years and am currently a 5th degree Black Belt, Master Instructor. As such, I am pretty familiar with the art and practice of self-defense. And it is from this experience that I want to offer some reflections on the violence that pervades our country.
Coming up through the tae kwon do ranks, I participated in a lot of tournaments. I sparred people regularly, both in class and in competition. Three times I kicked someone hard enough in the face to either break a tooth, or knock a tooth out. At other times I bruised my opponent or drew blood. These are not statements of pride, but of reflection. I am not a violent person, and for me, tae kwon do has always been more about mastering myself than mastering someone else. So I have remembered those instances when I have done obvious damage to another human being, most vividly.
One of the great gifts of martial arts is that you practice on real people. As you develop your skill, you are regularly testing them on your classmates. Which means that as you grow in power and strength, you also grow in your awareness of how that power and strength impacts another person. In other words, you get to feel the effects of your punches and your kicks. You feel their body react, and you feel the impact in your own body. This feedback loop is important. It teaches us a couple of things.
First, it reminds us that our opponents are humans just like we are, made of the same squishy flesh and the same hard bones. It is a sobering thing to feel a person’s tooth crunch under the impact of your kick. You begin to realize just how much damage you could do to a fellow human being.
Second, in feeling the impact we are implicated in the violence. Sometimes the kicks that hurt another person, hurt me too. Probably not as much, but they were felt. Which means that there was some level of sharing in the violent act. This is not just me doing something to another person; I was doing something to myself as well.
It strikes me that guns don’t offer any such feedback loop. Where I feel the difference between kicking an inanimate target and kicking a person, shooting either with a gun will feel exactly the same. Just the pressure of the recoil against your hand, and maybe your shoulder. Nor do guns offer any opportunity to practice on a fellow human. There is no learning to feel the effects of your strength as your power and skill grow. Instead, a gun immediately gives you the power to seriously damage or end another human life. In some ways, they are the weapons of cowards.
Guns may not have the same feedback loop as kicks do, but people are still implicated in the violence. Nobody shoots another person without it doing damage to themselves as well. Damaging another human life damages our own. And this is perhaps the most distorted part of our cultural narrative around guns.
We love the mythic idea of the hero who fought the good fight and can rest easy knowing that he/she did the right thing. We valorize the use of guns and other powerful weaponry in our military and our police forces. We hold to simplistic ideas that as long as the violence was legal, everything should be okay. But if you’ve ever talked to a soldier about their experience in a battle, you know that it isn’t that simple. They bear the scars of what they saw and what they did. They may not be physical scars, but they are emotional scars. And I would add that they are spiritual scars as well. Because as humans we are made in the image of a relational God, and when we inflict damage on another human, it damages us too. Even just observing damage done to a fellow human being can damage us. We are always implicated in the violence in which we partake.
The only way to avoid this, if there is any, is to dehumanize your opponent. This is the first step in any genocide, stripping a people group of their humanity. This has to be done because we have an intuitive revulsion against damaging or killing another human being. And if we don’t, this is a sign of some kind of psychopathy. We know this. We recognize the mental instability of mass shooters, and yet we can’t figure out why soldiers return from battle with PTSD and other disorders. It seems to me that we should expect battle to cause spiritual damage to the soldiers on both sides, and leave spiritual scars.
I guess the practical point of these reflections is simply to say that more violence does not solve the problem of violence. More spiritual scars do not heal a spiritually broken nation. Putting more guns in the hands of “good” people will not solve the problem. It will just lead to more “good” people with deep spiritual scars. Asking teachers to carry a gun to school and to be prepared to take the life of a student, former student, or any fellow human being is nonsense. Their job is to enhance the lives of their students, not end them.
This isn’t rocket science. (I can say that; I used to work at NASA.) Every other developed country has figured this out better than we have. Less guns leads to less gun violence. Every study shows this. The Second Amendment allows for a “well regulated Militia”; therefore gun regulations do not impinge on constitutional rights.
And for the love of God (literally), Christians are called to lay down their lives for one another. We are called to take up our cross as we follow Jesus, who never retaliated, never defended himself, and never demanded his rights.
Is it too much to ask for Christians in American to lay down one of their rights for the sake of many lives?
I recommend this song to you for further reflection.
https://youtu.be/Lsgbb23z27w