I’ve seen a lot of posts this week about gun violence, the love of guns over people, & the idolization of firearms. Granted, social media, like most online formats, is cultivated through tracking cookies to ensure I get content that aligns with my searches, posts, & general preferences. This ensures that what I see reaffirms my beliefs as correct, so most of what I’ve seen has been about gun regulation safety so that people, especially children, are cared for. The ongoing tragedy of gun violence is something that I believe thoughts & prayers have surpassed; we are at the point where we need to decide what it means to be the hands & feet of Christ in how we embody our response.
The question that I’ve been pondering this week is this: at what point do my personal rights end? Do they end at the intersection of me & you? Or do they end at the intersection of me & we? And to what extent do my beliefs regarding ethics inform my rights versus your rights being informed by your ethics? We like to think we all hold the same ethical compass of life, but if that were true, we wouldn’t have people convinced that gun rights & body autonomy are two separate issues with different types of regulation needed. After all, if your right to own a gun infringes on my right to bodily exist, then my right to bodily autonomy is apparently less important than the rights of inanimate objects & the right of capitalism’s false individualism’s exceptionalism construct.
Violence & bodily autonomy are inherently linked, especially in the form of oppressed bodies. In the news cycle this week, I read about Ugandan Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei dying after her boyfriend set her on fire as part of a domestic dispute. She was living in Kenya at the time & the articles said she was the third elite female athlete to be killed in Kenya in the last three years, each a woman killed in gender-based violence. Now, we may brush this off as something happening half a world away in another country. However, domestically, 1 in 3 women experiences gender-based violence at the hands of an intimate partner & from 1990 to 2010, approximately four out of five intimate partner violence victims were female. Now, we can pretend the rights of inanimate weapons don’t exist, yet the rights of physical female bodies seem to be of less importance in some circles than the rights of weapon manufacturers’ bottom lines. Consider the stats that tell us that abusers with guns are five times more likely to kill their partner & that every month, nearly 70 women are shot & killed by their intimate partner. These types of truths make me wonder when we will consider gender-based violence as part of the statistical data around mass shootings.
At what right do my personal rights end? Do they end at the intersection of me & you? Or do they end at the intersection of me & we? And at what point can we expect, as a society & culture that says we are founded on the concepts of life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness, we will actually enact laws & legislations that ensure the fullness of those principles to all who live within its shores?
In Christ’s Love,
