Hillary Clinton wants your guns

This side of the first Democratic presidential candidate debate, it is clear now that Hillary Clinton likely will be the Democratic nominee. And given the oddity of the Republican frontrunners—a bombastic businessman and a retired neurosurgeon with no governmental experience—her promises and pronouncements take on even greater significance. So it is alarming that she expressed openness to a mandatory gun buyback program modeled on an Australian one that President Obama referenced in his recent remarks about the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon. In response to a question from the audience at a campaign stop, Clinton said, “I think it would be worth considering doing it on a national level, if that could be arranged.”

But in America, such a gun purge is neither possible nor desirable.

As to the feasibility, our Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantees the right “to keep and bear arms.” It’s not the hunting amendment. It was intended to serve “the security of a free state.” It empowers the people to help resist invasion from abroad, tyranny at home, and even, arguably by extension, home and personal invasion. Repealing the amendment is politically inconceivable at this time.

Partly because of this legal guarantee and partly because of our frontier heritage, we have always had a deeply rooted gun culture. To impose a national program of gun confiscation on such a people would be an intolerable act of tyranny.

A move to round up all the legally owned guns in the country is also undesirable. People have a natural right to defend themselves against criminal violence. This summer, convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from prison in upstate New York. These were cold-blooded, merciless killers. No one had any reliable idea where they were. They could have been heading westward to Matt’s native Buffalo. Perhaps they were making their way north to the Canadian border. They could have been in anyone’s woodshed. People had guns on their kitchen tables and at their bedsides because anything could have happened at any time, and the police can’t be everywhere. New Yorkers were glad for their guns. People feel the same way in many under-policed, crime-saturated neighborhoods across the country.

But are gun rights even Christian? Does God expect His faithful ones to testify to our hope in what we cannot lose—our eternal lives—by letting home invaders and mass killers take what we cannot keep—our earthly lives? Jesus warns, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). But He tells the disciples whom He sends out in his name to buy swords for their journeys (Luke 22:36). Jesus tells His people not to resist people who do us evil, but instead to turn the other cheek when they are assaulted (Matthew 5:39). But His examples are of those who strike us or rob us, not try to kill us. When someone strikes a man’s wife, his Christian obligation is not to turn her other cheek but to defend her as appropriate. So too one’s home, one’s fellow worshipers, or one’s neighbors at the convenience store or on campus.