Aug 27 | Unarmed Saints

Shortly after the horrific Sandy Hook school shooting, I unfriended someone on Facebook. It was a guy I’d known from the Goth scene for a few years, and honestly, I had been planning to unfriend him for some time. He was a pretty interesting guy, often funny and generally friendly, but also a rabid libertarian and very proud of his many many MANY guns. He had multiple photographs and talked at length about how great they were.

Now I hope I’m not coming across as particularly judgemental – I generally don’t care about other people’s hobbies. I’m a “whatever floats your boat” kind of person most of the time. But I’ll go out on a limb here and say that people who get really excited about guns, particularly the kind that aren’t useful for hunting (or at least hunting game), make me nervous. It’s something that I really don’t understand. There are other types of weapons that interest me on an aesthetic level, like bows, glaives, and swords. My stagette party was a “Let’s get dressed up and go to the archery range and then a bar” affair, and I’m still considering enrolling at Academie Duello one day to take fencing lessons, because my childhood was basically defined by this scene.

Guns, though, creep me right the hell out. If I can go through my entire life without ever touching one, I will die a happy old fart.

I think part of it comes from the lack of beauty and skill involved. I mean, obviously skill is needed – target shooting is a thing. But there’s very little art to it beyond having a good eye. You line up your shot and you fire, and then something is wounded or dead. Sometimes it’s a deer that you need to last the winter, and sometimes it’s a kid coming home with Skittles and iced tea.

At any rate, this friend of mine basically started posting like crazy after the Sandy Hook shootings, about “personal responsibility,” mental health, and “Guns don’t kill people”. One of those things did need to be addressed, but I’ll let you guess which one.

I don’t even remember what he posted that finally led me to that Unfriend button, but it was something that would have been right at home at an NRA meeting. And I’ve been finished with those creeps for years.

Anyway, the reason that I told this story is that, when I heard about Antoinette Tuff, I almost wished I hadn’t unfriended him, just so I could ask him what he thought about her and how she prevented another school shooting.

If you haven’t actually heard about Antoinette Tuff, well, you really need to read about her, because she’s a hero. If I was the Pope I would canonize her in a minute. She was the bookkeeper of a small elementary school in Georgia who one day found herself on the wrong end of a weapon at the hands of a mentally disturbed 20-year-old who wasn’t on his medication. He had made plans to shoot up the school and didn’t care whether he lived or died.

Instead of responding to violence with violence, or cowering under her desk (as I probably would have done, heh), she spoke to him. She spoke words of compassion, forgiveness, and love to this guy, and managed to get him to turn himself in. She single-handedly prevented another tragedy – and is such a gem herself that, when later questioned, said, “I give it all to God.”

To me, this is a message that rang loud and clear. God has a plan for a hurting country that is so convinced of the necessity of weapons of war that it believes the only way to protect its children is with more of them, and it does not involve said weapons. I realize I must speak carefully because I am not an American. When I see reports on gun violence, I am baffled and saddened, because I’m not an American and I don’t understand the enshrined culture of guns. Much of the time I simply try and apply the same rules of cultural sensitivity that I often apply in most other cases of bafflement, but it’s getting more and more difficult. Many mass shootings have occurred over the years in the States, and they’ve gotten worse as time has gone by, likely because of the lifting of the assault weapons ban. The first school shooting I can remember was the one at Columbine High School. I was thirteen years old when that happened, a high school freshman. It was only one of the terrible events that shaped my generation as we came of age. I also recognize that plenty of other, non North American children grew up in far more terrifying circumstances, but this is part of what makes all of it so deeply disturbing to me. In many other countries terrible things happen due to impoverished groups, terrorism, nationalism, and conflicts that have often been nourished for many generations. In the United States, every so often, someone (most commonly a white male), goes and shoots a bunch of people, and there is usually little chance to find out specifically why, because often these people end up dead. These are people living in a part of the world that, while not a lap of luxury for everyone, has so very much. Where does this alienation come from? Mental illness is deeply stigmatized, but violence is actually fairly uncommon – people living with mental illness are far more likely statistically to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

I am quite convinced that the easy access to these kind of weapons – and their glorification by a culture that often regards the right to bear arms as directly handed down from God – contributes directly to the prevalence of these shootings, as well as a host of other problems including the lack of adequate mental health care and the patriarchal tendency to view getting help for such problems as a source of shame for young men who are expected to be stoic and never talk about their feelings or their fears.

So where does Antoinette Tuff fit in?

I think of her as a saint because she is a wake-up call. I believe the Holy Spirit worked directly through her to show us that Jesus’ way (and make no mistake that her way was his way, and the way of many other faiths, not the way of arming teachers and school security guards with guns) is the most effective way. She demonstrated love and compassion in a cruciform manner, not only by speaking with this young man but by sharing parts of her story, such as her recent divorce. She accepted her vulnerability and exposed his lovingly.

She is our wake-up call to the way of the cross, transforming fear, darkness, and death into new life.

I hope to God people can understand what this means.

I take issue with the fact that people have said, “She has the right name – she is tough.” No. No she wasn’t. That was the whole damn point. She was not “tough,” because being “tough” is putting a gun in someone’s face and calling them a pansy. Being “tough” is holding all of your hatred, anger, rage, and pain inside – unless your enemy is before you, when you are allowed to let it all come flying out. Being “tough” is calling therapy “touchy-feely BS.”

Most of all, being “tough” is looking down your nose at people you deem weaker than you, and crushing them underfoot.

Antoinette Tuff did not do any of those things. She extended a hand, and called the man who could easily have blown her head off “baby” and “sweetie.” She told him she loved him, because she “could tell he was a hurting young man,” and she told him that she understood how he felt because after her divorce she had contemplated suicide.

In other words, I believe she exhibited the strength of Jesus Christ, who was strong enough to come among us and experience the pain of rejection, hatred, and death first hand…and respond with love, acceptance, and transformation.

I have no problem saying Tuff was not tough – mostly because she would agree with me. In her own words:

“I’m not the hero. I was terrified.”

My prayer is that we can raise up a generation around the world like Antoinette Tuff and Malala Yousafzai who refuse to let the violence done to them dictate their responses.

“Let streams of living justice flow down upon the earth,

Give freedom’s light to captives; let all the poor have worth.”

-Clarity