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More guns, less crime ? The world upside down.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said this as his response to the massacre of children at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Connecticut : ‟The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

According to Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who dedicate himself and his organization Sojourners to address social injustice, « That statement is at the heart of the problem of gun violence in America today — not just because it is factually flawed, which of course it is, but also because it is morally mistaken, theologically dangerous, and religiously repugnant. »

Jim, with whom I had the chance to dialogue on a number of occasions, gives the following exemple : « Rev. Phil Jackson, a young dynamic street pastor from Chicago told me that Chicago had 2,400 shootings in 2012 — 505 of them resulting in death. More than 100 of them were children from elementary to high school. Almost all of the murdered ones were people and children of color — African-American and Latino. That’s more gun deaths in Chicago than American troop deaths in Afghanistan last year. One city. »

Jim Wallis, ‟The NRA’s Dangerous Theology”, on www.sojourners.org, 17 January, 2013.