ACCIDENT OR ESSENCE: HOW THE SIN OF GUN VIOLENCE IMPLICATES US ALL
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In my early theology classes, I learned from the philosophers the difference between accident and essence. The essence of a table is its table-ness; its accidents are the attributes we choose when selecting which table will fit in our dining room – whether it is large or small, metal, wood, or plastic, how many legs it has and whether they are strategically placed to bruise the knees of the unsuspecting diner.
I learned that at the Eucharist, many Christians believe and understand that the essence of the elements is changed, metamorphosized, into Body and Blood, while the accidents of bread and wine remain: its crumbliness, its sourness, its ability to stain fair linen, moving through the capillaries of the fibres, spreading and opening like a wound.
When it comes to gun violence the ingredients for another kind of accident surround us, a recipe for disaster baked into our common life. Nearly 500 people die from unintentional gunshot wounds every year, and many more are injured, according to The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. “Guns don’t kill people”, some aver, yet the gun’s raison d’etre is as clearly to kill as a table’s is to bear the burdens of our bread and wine.
Arguing the accidents of the gun—Was it loaded? Was it locked? Was it licensed? Was it stolen? Did it look like a toy? Who was responsible for it?—against its essence can sometimes feel like counting the angels who can dance on the head of a pin.
On a filmset designed to mimic the accidents of the Old West a woman is killed, and as yet no one seems to know why. In the local news, I read about a pair of toddlers who found a gun at home, and take in the unassimilable information that a child, barely more than a baby, is dead by the uncomprehending hand of another. Across the country, a few days later, it happens again. This time there is one child, one gun, one more death. This, as much as the tropes of the Wild West, has become far too familiar a story. A gun-store owner mistakes his handgun for a toy, and shoots an employee dead by accident. God be with the grieving.
The words of the Confession offered in Enriching Our Worship I include among our occasions for repentance, “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” While the composition is sometimes received as controversial, citing a strong ethical tradition that one can only confess one’s own sins, and not those of another, its construction encompasses the responsibility that we bear together for creating the conditions in which evil, and accident, might abound. This responsibility may be recognized, too, in the plural pronoun of the Confessions of the Book of Common Prayer.
John Macquarrie, writing in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, describes accidents
…as events which have not been foreseen and have not been consciously intended to happen…Although accidents are often said to happen “by chance,” they are as much a part of the causal network as any other events. They arise when two or more separate series of events unexpectedly converge or coincide…or when through human negligence or misjudgment an expected event fails to happen…or through a combination of such circumstances. (1)
In other words, accidents do not simply happen, unless the conditions exist or are created in which the accident can happen. These conditions are examined in cases such as the Rust set shooting, the so-called “family fire” tragedies, and the gun-store mishap, to determine who created the dangerous conditions and whether negligence or misjudgement were involved, all in the interest of finding out who is at fault and who can be held legally liable for letting the accident happen.
There is a broader question of how far we all are at fault, in a consensually-governed society, for allowing the conditions to come into being in which accidents are waiting to happen.
As Macquarrie continues in his examination of the accident:
The duty to prevent accidents as far as is humanly possible makes both personal and social moral demands. On the personal level, there must be the avoidance of acts that are dangerous to oneself or others…Each society has the duty to legislate in the interests of the safety of its citizens. This ought to be done, even if the legislators find themselves unpopular …” (2)
There is, in other words, a communal and social as well as personal responsibility to be borne when accidents happen. We are each, in this way, our siblings’ as well as our children’s keepers.
According to research at aftermath.com, accidental shootings account for around 1% of gun fatalities in the US; they also note that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to such accidents, and that, “a statistically significant association exists between gun availability and the rates of unintentional firearm deaths, homicides, and suicides.”
Since that research was published, gun violence has risen to first place in the cause of death for children and teens in the US.
For each individual act that was, is, will be tomorrow a genuine and tragic accident, our hearts go out to those who die or are injured, and often to those whose own hands betrayed them, whose split seconds cannot be taken back, who live with the consequences of outrageous fortune.
Still, for the rest of us the question must be raised, when the ingredients for disaster surround us, is it any accident that they keep being baked into tragedy?
In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Shakespeare has Isabella spit judgement at Claudio, who would prostitute his sister to save his skin, trading her sex for clemency from his sentence of death for the crime of, ironically, fornication:
“O fie, fie, fie!
Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade.”
Our sin as an armed society awash in guns is not accidental: it is a cynical trade. NSSF, The Firearm Industry Trade Association, reports that
The economic growth America’s firearm and ammunition industry has experienced in recent years has been nothing short of remarkable. Over the past decade, the industry’s growth has been driven by an unprecedented number of Americans choosing to exercise their fundamental right to keep and bear arms and purchase a firearm and ammunition…In 2020 the firearms and ammunition industry was responsible for as much as $63.49 billion in total economic activity in the country.
We ply the Second Amendment against the life and liberty to pursue happiness of babes and sucklings. During the same period that the NSSF applauds the firearm industry for adding value to the economy, Everytown Research & Policy reports
In 2020, gun sales surged 64 percent, and this rise—coupled with school and childcare center closures as a result of the pandemic—has increased the risk for all household residents: the number of unintentional shooting deaths by children was 31 percent higher from March through December 2020 than during the same period in 2019.
I could not help but notice that the project reporting the data is called the #NotAnAccident Index.
In musical theory (and practice), an accidental changes the note, making it sharper (higher) or flatter (lower), or restoring it to its original state. Accidents happen, we are told, and it may sometimes be that an accident is no sin. Who could impute guilt to an infant? But for us, for the US, the accidental has become an essential part of the tune.
If we are to look for life among the accidents of death, we must be willing to repent, to undergo some essential metamorphosis of our own. “All who take the sword will perish by the sword,” Jesus warned his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:52, NRSV). We cannot claim our collective sin of gun violence as accidental if we are unwilling to rewrite the score.
The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, edited by James F. Childress and John Macquarrie (The Westminster Press, 1986), 7.
Ibid, 7-8.
