{"id":10140,"date":"2012-12-16T02:00:29","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/?p=10140"},"modified":"2012-12-16T02:02:58","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T08:02:58","slug":"a-confession-and-a-few-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/a-confession-and-a-few-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"A confession and a few questions&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/a-confession-and-a-few-questions\/love-is-a-weapon-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-10141\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-content\/uploads\/love-is-a-weapon-500x500.jpg\" alt=\"Love is a weapon\" width=\"500\" height=\"500\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-10141\" srcset=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-content\/uploads\/love-is-a-weapon-500x500.jpg 500w, http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-content\/uploads\/love-is-a-weapon-150x150.jpg 150w, http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-content\/uploads\/love-is-a-weapon-300x300.jpg 300w, http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-content\/uploads\/love-is-a-weapon.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve written before, I <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/cornel-west-on-obama-and-osama\/\">consider<\/a> myself a <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/i-want-to-be-a-pacifist-until\/\">pacifist<\/a> and I want to see <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/responding-to-emails\/\">much stronger gun control<\/a> in American because I believe the harder it is for people to get a weapon, the less likely they are to use it.<\/p>\n<p>I truly long for the day when nuclear weapons, assault weapons, semi-automatic guns, muskets, pocket knifes and all other weapons of any sort are made into plowshares. <\/p>\n<p>And I long for Shalom and Pax Dei.<\/p>\n<p>And yet I confess that I understand that even banning all guns of all sort won&#8217;t stop all assaults or killings of any other sort. When a person&#8217;s heart is set on killing another human being &#8211; they&#8217;ll find a way.<\/p>\n<p>So with this quandary at our doorstep, how do we as an American culture and society change the hearts and minds of our fellow countrymen where the life of a 1st grader is just as valuable as the life of the President, a movie star, a drug dealer or an imam living in Iran? <\/p>\n<p>How do we change our mindset that murder is not an option &#8211; either in jealous rage, depression, governmental retaliation or by lethal injection?<\/p>\n<p>How do we move from a culture of violence (and especially redemptive violence) to a culture of <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/death-of-an-enemy\/\">forgiveness<\/a> and second chances?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve written before, I consider myself a pacifist and I want to see much stronger gun control in American because I believe the harder it is for people to get a weapon, the less likely they are to use it. I truly long for the day when nuclear weapons, assault weapons, semi-automatic guns, muskets, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/a-confession-and-a-few-questions\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A confession and a few questions&#8230;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[1524,2039,3684,4370,1826],"class_list":["post-10140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-forgiveness","tag-gun-control","tag-guns","tag-redemptive-violence","tag-violence"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-2Dy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}