“Dear Mr. Lapierre,”

February 15, 2018

 

Mr. Wayne Lapierre

President

National Rifle Association of America

11250 Waples Mill Road

Fairfax, VA 22030

 

Dear Mr. Lapierre:

 

Yesterday in America we celebrated Valentine’s Day and Catholics around the world also marked the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. We also watched the unfolding nightmare in Florida with 17 dead, brought about by a deeply disturbed young man and his rifle. Like in most mass shootings, the shooter did not break a single law until he chambered his first round and fired it into his first victim.

You know the list better than anyone. Some 26 church-going people in Texas gunned down by a madman using a weapon that used .223 caliber military style ammunition. Another madman in Las Vegas used the same ammunition, plus 7.62 millimeter and a few other types to kill 58 and injure more than 500. Before that it was the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and 49 dead (9 millimeter and 7.62 millimeter), Virginia Tech with 32 dead, (.223 and .22 calibers)  and Sandy Hook Elementary with 27 dead, 20 of them children (223 caliber). The list is endless, including Columbine’s 13 dead (9 millimeter), Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead (.40 caliber and .223 caliber) and on and on. In most cases, very large quantities of legally purchased ammunition were part of the story.

You, Mr. Lapierre, can help fix this. Your organization is, in fact, the law when it comes to gun ownership. Your organization is all powerful, you control the politicians at any level of government. You are exceptionally well funded and can make or break politicians who oppose your 2nd Amendment position. I’m not naive enough to think that a Republican held House, Senate and White House are going to oppose you on gun ownership. We just wait two weeks until the funerals are over and the news cycle rotates and then we can brace for the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.

But your organization, Mr. Lapierre, was founded on the issue of firearms safety. Why not return to those worthy roots and get behind this simple idea:

Start treating the most deadly ammunition the same way we treat powerful drugs that require a doctor’s prescription. Recognize that certain type of ammunition need to be controlled, because they are overwhelmingly used in homicides and mass shootings. Get them off the retail market, both in stores and online. They include: 

  • 9 MM
  • 7.62 MM
  • .223 CAL
  • .380 CAL
  • .45 CAL ACP
  • .22 CAL

This means that within a defined period of time (90-180 days?), these ammunitions come off the retail shelves and the Internet and enter a federally controlled distribution system. This also means that all other types of ammunition are unaffected by this law. You can buy all the shotgun shells, 30.06 rounds, etc. you want (subject to local regulations) for hunting, sporting clays, whatever. These rounds aren’t the problem; they mostly kill deer, birds, varmints, and clay pigeons.  

 The NRA, and probably only the NRA, could make this happen. And in doing so, you could provide the nation with a solution that its citizens desperately want, but whose politicians are mortally afraid to move on. But not if you were behind it.

There are some practical aspects to the plan, so that we keep the range shooters happy, ammo manufacturers can still sell their product, etc. I wrote up some of the practical steps in an article on a blog site. You can read it at http://uncletommyonline.com/?p=377, if you care to. It says some unflattering things about the NRA, but we’re all big boys, so I think we can get past it.

In a single bold stroke, the NRA could alter its’ image within this country and the world from a polarizing stance of “gun ownership freedom at all costs” to the “champions of public safety.” Your membership would grow considerably, once the polarization was off the table and you were behind saving innocent lives. Hell, I‘d even join.

And you can keep your 2nd Amendment position intact. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about bullets, only the muzzles they come out of.  It’s an opportunity for the NRA, Mr. Lapierre. I’m guessing you must be as tired of counting bodies as the rest of us.

 

Sincerely,

Tom Wogan, Sr.

Private Citizen

Catholic Born

You know that part of the scripture they read at Christmas where they recite the lineage from Abraham to Isaac, to Jacob, and then about thirty five others who were all “begot’ until they finally get down to Joseph, the father of Jesus? I once asked a priest that if Jesus was really the result of the ”Virgin Birth,” as I was taught, then aren’t all of those guys on that lengthy list just his step-father’s dead relatives? For some reason, he seemed annoyed with me.

Either through fate, family history, or some combination of parental decisions, personal calls, happenstance, or whatever other forces out there control one’s destiny, I am and always have been pretty Catholic.

Consider the facts. I was baptized Catholic, owe every academic credential I have to Catholics schools, once thought I would be a priest, have worked for priests, brothers and nuns for a collective total of about eleven years (and counting) of my varied career, was active in parish leadership, raised my kids Catholic and, as far as I know, am in good standing with the church. And I married a Catholic girl even more Catholic than me. Who else do you know can recite from memory the list of priestly vestments (chasuble, alb, cincture, and some other stuff), the seven deadly sins (gluttony, sloth, and more bad things you shouldn’t do) and the Memorare? I won’t even go into her devotion to Mary, which is some sort of happy feminist spiritual preference, as if Mary is the only saint who can be really trusted, most of the rest being men.

That old Catholic church that defined much of my youth seems like a distant memory now. I remember it as a Church of ironclad and seemingly timeless rules, the endless list of things we did and said that seem so silly now. Taking communion on your tongue without biting into the host, never touching a chalice (some boy did, we were told, and he died), fasting, wearing scapulars like G.I. dogtags, writing AMDG or JMJ on top of each page of schoolwork, rosaries, novenas, masses with school attendance taken, mortal and venial sins, purgatory, hell, telling your oft-repeated three or four pre-adolescent sins to some guy in a box each week.

Today, I’m not an angry Catholic, just a mystified and somewhat dissatisfied one. Along the way I jettisoned most of the doctrinal baggage so carefully installed by a host of nuns and priests in my formative years. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, and it’s not a loss of faith. It’s just that over time I grew to consider it just so much extra unimportant detail to the core of the message.

The list of lost luggage is lengthy and includes the aforementioned virgin birth, the immaculate conception, transubstantiation, the need for male celibate priests, the assumption of anyone’s actual body into heaven, Jesus as something other than an extraordinary man, little cherub angels, purgatory, plenary indulgences that mirrored our federal prison parole guidelines, demons, wood from the True Cross, and the many heads of John the Baptist scattered throughout Europe. And I might do a run-on sentence like this last one, but I don’t do confession.

Some things have added to my cynicism. On my first visit to Rome, I visited the Vatican Museum, a garish monument to the Catholic Church’s rich history of basically ripping off anything of value from Europe or Africa and the Middle East that wasn’t nailed down. After about 200 statues, I had seen enough. I have visited the Knock shrine in Ireland, held so dear by its locals, but which, like Fatima and Lourdes, has evolved into a bit of a religious side show. I have seen the 35 foot-tall silver aluminum statue of Mary as it made its rounds to churches in Chicago, rising like a sort of devotional ICBM from a flatbed truck, the personal penance of some poor guy who once owned liquor stores, or so I heard. It hasn’t exactly deepened my faith.

I have tried to center my faith on the essential meaning of Jesus, a man who came along at a moment in history and told us to love each other, forgive each other, to stop stealing from each other, conquering each other, and butchering each other. Simple enough instructions that we still haven’t mastered, but I can admire and try to follow the playbook well enough.

He came at a time when the world was maybe for the first time ready to start listening, and his message grew from that point onward as a force for good, through apostles, martyrs, and simple people in search of answers. He didn’t need to be anything other than an exceptionally good man of God to start the world in a new direction, and, as so often happens, they killed him for it. His story and his meaning doesn’t require that he be born without human intercourse, that he be some sort of “man-god” or even that he rise from the dead.  I realize that the Church, if they really thought me important enough (they don’t) to single me out for these beliefs, could deny me last rites and burial in a Catholic cemetery, but I have my cremation “get out of jail free” card, so I’ll take my chances. Just scatter my ashes on the 6th hole at Ridge Country Club.

So I still go to Mass most Sundays, perhaps missing during a week when we attend a funeral or if the weekend is too crowded. I go there usually pleasantly, grateful for the quiet comfort of being part of a large group of people whom I assume are of similar thought and belief as me. I go hoping to hear a good homily, but those are as rare these days as political elections that I feel good about. I go to enjoy the music, especially a good choir. I go to spend an hour with my wife at my side where we just “are”.  Sometimes I just go out of a sense of obligation. Sometimes I go when I really do feel the need to pray for something.

But lately I feel like I am a tenant in a building where many people are moving out and no one is moving in. The Catholic Church is in a downward spiral, or maybe a downward spiral with a turn to the right. Fewer churches, fewer active members, some moving to evangelical churches that mange to better answer their needs. As I write this, some 26 Chicago parishes need pastors and only 19 are available.

And of those 19, how many would you feel good about? I lost count of the number of stories I have heard about some Catholic priest denying marriage, requiem mass, or baptism in their church based on attendance at mass or donation records. I recently sat through an embarrassing 30-minute harang by a pastor to an absolutely packed church regarding his personal expectations of the churchgoers in terms of promptness, singing, and leaving early. Bite me, father. An archbishop who I actually went to school with will not bury gay Catholics in his diocese, even though death kind of settles your sexuality issues.  It’s not just quantity, but quality.

Orders of nuns, priests, and brothers are in their sunset years now, with pathetically few younger members. The model that once attracted so many young new leaders, myself included, is broken. And the endless file of the sexually abused and the indefensible cover-ups by the hierarchy have all but snuffed out the flames of devotion in even the most Catholic of Catholics. But the voice of “super Catholics” seems to be on the rise, those homophobic, pro-life, pro-death penalty (I’ll never get that) adherents to Doctrine as defined in Rome. A bleak future, if we change nothing.

Much of this downward spiral, and this is most mystifying of all, is driven by the insistence of a male celibate priest model. We are watching parishes around the country being rolled into other parishes, and not really for lack of enough faithful, as for lack of leadership. The hierarchy tries to fill in the holes with young priests from the third world or Eastern Europe. They might as well try extra-terrestrials, as I have witnessed homilies so out of touch with our reality as to generate good stories at parties. Some zealous kid from Manilla or Krakow, however well meaning, is not the answer. Nor are lay deacons, who do a good job, but who are too few in number.

The solutions are obvious and, I think, probably acceptable to most Catholics not on the extreme right: drop the requirement for celibacy for men and allow women to be ordained. Do those two things, or even one or the other, and your shortage of ministers problem goes away in a few years. Fact is, being a priest is not a bad job and people who are sensitive and compassionate and who want to make a difference will find it a natural calling. I happen to work in a place with some amazing nuns who would be terrific pastors, and a damned sight better at preaching than the last five guys I endured. When it comes to ministry, it’s like we have one hand tied behind our collective backs and our “top down” authority structure shows no sign of movement. Therein lies the dissatisfaction.

I remarked to one of the sisters recently that I often wondered “Why am I still Catholic?”

She shrugged, smiled, and said, “Where else would we go?”

Where, indeed?