A comedian I really like tweeted the following:

Dare I say, part of the problem with religion is that people feel that praying for shooting victims is enough. Make gun laws not gun love.

— Paula Poundstone (@paulapoundstone) June 2, 2016

Recognizing that this is a tweet and is therefore limited to 140 characters, also recognizing that she is an atheist and therefore probably doesn’t have a robust understanding of prayer, also that she is a comedian so this is a schtick, I’d still like to use her tweet as a springboard to engage this a bit.

First, I don’t know anyone who thinks prayer for shooting victims is all that needs to be done. It is a generalization that is unfair to “religion”. Many religions operate hospitals; have chaplains in hospitals, police forces, and prisons; and many people from many different stripes of religion are on different sides of the gun control debate.

Second, her assumption is that the answer to gun violence is gun laws. Gun laws, in and of themselves, are incapable of stopping gun violence. I’d just point to the tragic case of Chicago which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation and some of the highest gun violence and deaths in the nation as well. The number of laws on the books has swollen over the past few decades and crime is not abated in the least.

Third, prayer is actually more effective than adding laws to laws. Christians (a subset of “religion”) believe that when we pray, we are asking the greatest Power in the universe to employ the greatest wisdom in the universe motivated by the greatest love in the universe to act on the situation we care deeply about but only understand a fraction of. It is not simply sending positive thoughts at the clouds. God is capable of changing human hearts and ruling over nations.

“So,” I can image her asking, “why doesn’t he do something about this? Either he is indifferent, incapable, or imaginary.” Not so fast. God has done things about this and we’re ignoring them. He has told us that humans are created in his image and therefore are sacred. Instead we have determined that humans are sophisticated animals and nothing more. When you degrade human life, don’t be surprised when it is treated and taken cheaply. If we were to understand humans the way God has made us, we might take human life much more serious.

The other thing we’ve done to ignore God’s method of restraining this kind of violence is that we’re getting rid of capital punishment. The non-religious opposition to this is very confusing to me. If, as atheists assume, humans are mere animals why shouldn’t we kill them if they become this dangerous?¹There is a Christian opposition to capital punishment but that is beyond the point I’m trying to make here. Since we are made in God’s image, God doesn’t give us that kind of liberty in executing people. Because humans are created in his image, anyone who kills a human is to be killed (Gen. 9:6). The punishment must fit the crime. Instead we no long punish but seek to rehabilitate and therefore the punishment never ends. Executing murders is not meant to teach people who to not kill, it is intended to show how special human life is and remind people what the consequence is of taking it.

To be fair, the way we’re currently employing capital punishment needs very much to be reformed. It is not being applied fairly. But that doesn’t mean that we should throw it out instead of addressing it.

So two of the ways that God has given the nations to control violence are largely cast aside and then people complain about the results.