The Wild West and the Wild Left is no place reasonable people want to live.

by Frank Schaeffer

It seems to me that NRA/open-carry/gun lobby AND de-fund the police activists are BOTH mistaken. We think of these movements as opposites. They aren’t. They both express individualistic impulses from people who ignore the human evolution of community.

SOCIETY

The greatest social advance was creating community-based rules on the use of lethal force. We don’t live in forts or have to wear armor or carry weapons when we shop for groceries ONLY because humans evolved laws, courts, and cops.

Before that in tribal cultures violent death was 500 per 100 thousand people. We now have 5 violent deaths per 100 thousand people. Duh!

What we need is to reform BOTH the racist police-and especially their horrible unions that protect racist violent cops at any cost-AND destroy the nihilism of the gun lobby. The racist police culture must be changed AND the gun lobby must be destroyed.

GUNS

We can respect the 2nd Amendment, and own guns AND regulate them: No high capacity magazines. No military-style weapons. Strict background checks. No “open carry.” No “stand your ground.” No domestic abusers allowed to own a gun-ever.

COPS

Police unions must and can be reformed. Police must be fired and prosecuted for abusive and all racist behavior. No more prosecutors “investigating” the police they work with. No more pretending many cops aren’t racists.

BUT…

The idea that we should go back to every person for themselves with us all carrying weapons and/or with no cops to call is absurd. The paranoid fantasies of the Wild West of the NRA/gun lobby, and the paranoid fantasies of the Wild Left are no place reasonable people want to live.

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How do we make our way back into love, beauty and creation? Discover my book Letter to Lucy: A Manifesto of Creative Redemption—In the Age of Trump, Fascism and Lies, a multi-touch book about art, love and parenting, from the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the prophetic music of Green Day and everything in between. Read the first chapter for free on your kindle fire or iOS device. Available now on Apple Books and Amazon Kindle Fire.
 

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Caught between the beauty of his grandchildren and grief over a friend’s death, Frank Schaeffer finds himself simultaneously believing and not believing in God—an atheist who prays. Schaeffer wrestles with faith and disbelief, sharing his innermost thoughts with a lyricism that only great writers of literary nonfiction achieve. Schaeffer writes as an imperfect son, husband and grandfather whose love for his family, art and life trumps the ugly theologies of an angry God and the atheist vision of a cold, meaningless universe. Schaeffer writes that only when we abandon our hunt for certainty do we become free to create beauty, give love and find peace. Available now at Amazon.
 

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In 1998, Frank Schaeffer was a bohemian novelist living in “Volvo driving, higher-education worshipping” Massachusetts with two children graduated from top universities. Then his youngest child, straight out of high school, joined the United States Marine Corps. Written in alternating voices by eighteen-year-old John and his father, Frank, Keeping Faith takes readers in riveting fashion through a family’s experience of the Marine Corps: from being broken down and built back up on Parris Island (and being the parent of a child undergoing that experience), to the growth of both father and son and their separate reevaluations of what it means to serve. Available now at Amazon.

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