Turkeys

The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice. Fools show their annoyance at once, but the prudent overlook an insult. Proverbs 12:15,16 NIV

We give advice to others quite easily, but we don’t take wise or well meaning advice when it is offered, right? It’s a normal human nature thing and easily seen and demonstrated. Take smoking for example. When common sense and medical opinion shows that smoking is bad for your health, non smokers take it on board, but smokers seem to do an ‘ostrich’ and pretend the doctors and police are wrong, and they know better. Then there is the massive problem of alcohol in the community and the havoc it causes, so when the UK and Scottish governments try to bring in a minimum price per unit of alcohol, the drinks industry have a problem in accepting the evidence. The result is that they have their own ‘evidence’, and they too behave like ostriches.

At the expense of ruffling some feathers, there are also some turkeys who would not vote for Christmas because it would mean a big problem for their own agenda, and they are not prepared to take advice which might just lead to a partial solution. Our verse today is very relevant to this trait of human nature.

We were all disgusted by the deranged action of a young man in Connecticut, USA, who single handedly ended the lives of many young lives before ending his own. How do you get into the mind of someone who would do such a thing? No one wants this to ever happen again, but this is said after every massacre of innocents, especially in the USA, that land of freedoms, including the freedom to buy weapons of mass human destruction, and use them senselessly.

The answer to the other problems mentioned, is not more tobacco or alcohol, but a responsible limitation by law. The lobbies of these groups needed to be overcome and even discounted because their arguments were invalid. Is it possible that the NRA gun lobby in the USA needs to be handled the same way? I saw a sad, and sincere comment about the latest massacre, that if the teachers had been armed, the problem would not have happened. In other words, more guns, not fewer. The big argument that it is the person who does the killing, and not the gun, is a very small part of the solution and is only partly true. A deranged person with a baseball bat is not the same as that same person with a firearm. And please don’t give the argument that the shooters would get their hands on these weapons anyway. To follow the rationale of the gun lobby to its logical conclusion means that the defence of the youth of the USA means that everybody at every level should own, and be prepared to use, a gun. Don’t you hear bells ringing? I do!

(This was originally written some months ago, and held on advice. Since then another student shooting has happened in California, and children killed in Sandy Hook Elementary school, and once again the same old tired and lame arguments are trotted out by the NRA. Responsible laws are being processed in the UK to limit the availability of tobacco and alcohol because this is the only way to reduce the widespread harm they cause. A gunman entered a primary school in Scotland in 1996 and killed 17 children. As a result, gun control laws were introduced over the protests of the gun users. Take a guess how many criminal handgun killings there have been since then? I’ll give you a clue: It’s less than 1. So, how about the US NRA pulling on the big boy’s pants and accepting some much needed responsible gun control laws, or do we accept the spiralling gun deaths as part of ‘life’, and allow the carnage of young lives to continue? If so, please spare me the crocodile tears of the gun waving US NRA. Our personal freedoms also come with community responsibility.)