Guns, God, and Guts

This morning, on my rainy drive to work, I stopped at the stoplight that always gets me, the one at Shawnee Mission Parkway and Nall. I ran the wipers once and gazed at the other cars around me. Jackpot~ an old-school, white Suburban held the front spot in the left turn lane. On its back window, proudly lined up in the center, was a bumper sticker: Guns, God, and Guts are What Made America Free. Next to this glamorous slogan was a crude drawing of fingers, curled around the base of a handgun, with the barrel pointed straight at the unsuspecting Kia behind it.

I see things like this and I think about recent events in our country, about recent events in my hometown. I wonder if the person driving that Suburban has ever felt empathy in their life. I drive my car to work in the rain, desperately repeating "GunsGodandGuts, GunsGodandGuts" so I can quickly snap an email off to my friend. She and I like to compare absurd vanity plates, and I think this bumper sticker will be quite the feather in my cap. Like that, I erased empathy and replaced it with sneering mockery. The driver of that Suburban is no longer a person, but a symbol of everything that I think is wrong with our country right now. There's not a single cell in my brain that can fathom why someone would form a belief system that could support such a slogan.

Should I feel sorry for this driver the same way I feel sorry for victims of gun violence? The first thing that flashed through my mind when I saw that car was "I wish that driver would have someone he or she loved killed by gun violence. Then they'd think twice about guns and god and guts." But is that fair? It's not. Are handguns and their ubiquity fair? No, I don't think that's fair either. What a mess. What freedom.