"No Way to Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (Headline from The Onion)
I'm a big fan of thoughts and prayers. I bestow thoughts and prayers all the time. It's fashionable, it doesn't take much time, and it fits my budget. The only drawback to bestowing thoughts and prayers is that I don't seem to lose a lot of weight while doing it. All that being said, however, I've been trying to come up with a way to reduce hail-of-bullets mass slaughters, and I must admit that my very sincere thoughts and prayers don't seem to be having much effect. I don't appear to be making a dent in the body counts.
I'm not the only one at a strategic impasse, either. The Onion, with its fine, consistent reporting of Uvalde, has been covering these massacres for a decade. Here's what The Onion had to say. The fact that this is what The Onion always has to say doesn't lessen the utility of its reporting:
"This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them," said Idaho resident Kathy Miller, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world's deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than other developed nations.
Alternative Facts
I want to point out something science-y that many liberal anti-gun journalists may have missed because they postulate that Americans are hateful, psychotic, irresponsible, held hostage by the gun lobby, irredeemably evil, or complete idiots. I want to point out that correlation is not causation.
Americans may suffer more mass casualties because we are better shots that any other nationality. This is, after all, the land of Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickock. A country where each major comics company has beloved gun-toting assassins as featured characters. Children of all ages aspire to be comic book mainstays Deadshot, Bullseye, and the Punisher. One nation, undoubtedly under God, where rites of passage include buying a car, an assault rifle, and voting (in that order). Americans are simply better shots -- faster, more accurate, with a tradition of accuracy unmatched by other nationalities.
And that is why we lead the world in casualties from mass shootings. It's not because we're psychotic.
Thoughts and Prayers
I've invested a great deal of thoughts and prayers in how to stop these assault weapon massacres. My investment of thoughts and prayers pointed me to one possible explanation as to why thoughts and prayers haven't been working too well.
Now hear me out. Is it possible that thoughts and prayers combined have a set limit? In other words, if you do X amount of praying, 1-X is all the thinking you can do. And if you do Y amount of thinking, 1-Y is all the praying you can do. What I'm suggesting is that there's a cap on the useful combination of thinking and praying, and that cap amount just isn't enough to come up with a rational solution (thinking) to gun violence, and it's not enough to get God's attention (praying) to stop the gun violence.
When you think (or pray) about it, my theory of the combined thoughts/prayers limits makes a lot of sense. Republicans, who pray a lot, seem to have some thinking deficiencies. And we all know that the profane American Democrats seem to think too much and pray too little. Thus, thoughts and prayers aren't enough to solve the assault weapons problem. It's a mathematical law of nature. We can label it "Dietz's Sacred/Profane Theorem."
My Solution
I have a workaround for Dietz's Theorem, however. It's genius if I say so myself.
Praying by itself doesn't seem to solve America's massacre problems. Maybe Americans don't pray well. Maybe cell phone towers disrupt prayer waves enroute to God. Whatever it is, we have an issue.
But what if we augment our prayers? What if we pray for having more effective prayers? If we all pray about praying, God will amplify our prayers so that He can hear our prayers.
Praying about praying should be our new national mantra. Set aside an increasing chunk of your prayer time each day to pray for our praying. Churches should also set aside a portion of each service every week to pray for praying. If the assault weapon massacres continue, we should just devote more and more of each church service to praying about praying. And there's a built-in backup plan if our praying for praying doesn't impede the slaughter. I know it's a bit radical, but we could consider praying to improve our praying to improve praying.
These are just my thoughts on the matter. And my prayers, of course.
Bob Dietz
May 29, 2022
