Before the bodies had cooled or the blood congealed, President Obama stalked to the nation’s television cameras and with phony rage damned the guns that law abiding Americans own, and blamed them for the latest mass shooting. 

He pursed his lips.  He glared.  He was really mad.  He said, “Here we are again.  This has become routine.  What I have to say has become routine.”  So he said it anyway--that we wouldn’t have shootings like the one that had just occurred at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon if we had stricter gun laws.

It was all theater, set against a backdrop of horror and tragedy for the victims and their families.  A convenient opportunity for the President to push one of his favorite causes: the disarming of the American people.  Banning guns would fix what is wrong with our nation.  Hypocrisy.  Blatant political manipulation.  The President said that the states that have the strictest gun laws have the fewest shootings.  Pile on the lies to make your point, Mr. President.

Let’s take the President’s home state, Illinois, as an example.  Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.  Chicago, where the President calls home, has tighter gun laws than almost any other American city.  Since 2012 there have been 6000 shootings on the streets of Chicago.  One thousand six hundred seventy-five people have been murdered.  Ninety percent of these are black on black crimes.  The streets are ruled by gangs.  Fifty people were shot in Chicago over the past weekend.  All those gun laws did a great job of keeping the peace didn’t they?  But the President does not speak of this.

Umpqua Community College was a gun free zone.  Nobody had guns there, not even the lone security guard who was on duty on the other side of the campus.  It should have been a place of safety, a refuge where students young and old could learn in peace.  The sort of place President Obama would praise as an example of what he has in mind by banning guns.  The nearest police were based forty minutes away.  All these factors made UCC a soft target for a psychologically disturbed twenty-six year-old man who had washed out of army basic training. He arrived on campus with five hand guns and a rifle.  No one could stop him. 

He walked into a classroom and shot a professor in the head at point blank range.  Then, according to eyewitness and survivor testimony, he lined students up and asked them, “What is your religion?”  To those who answered that they were Christians, he said, “That’s good, because in about two seconds you are going to meet God.”  Then he shot them in the head.   Others he merely maimed.  Nine lie dead.  Nine others are wounded.  When the police finally arrived he turned on them and died in a hail of bullets.

Are guns the cause of the string of mass shootings we have been experiencing across America?  Of course not.  But there is a cause.  With each crack of a gun we are hearing the snapping of the American culture as it fractures and collapses around us.  Something is dreadfully wrong.  And it is us.  Our hearts, not our guns.

Many of our fellow citizens have entertained a hostility toward God and his people.  A seething hatred has slithered out of hell and infected millions upon millions of us.  It rises all the way to the top.  The President’s administration is the most openly hostile, anti-Christian government in our history.  As a result persecution directed against Christians has now come out into the open. In Oregon Christians were singled out and slaughtered.  In Charleston another gunman invaded the sanctity of a church to commit his religious murders. 

Go back to the President’s desk.  The United States has received 4000 Syrian refugees who are Muslims.  Meanwhile Christian refugees from Syria are being deported and others refused entry.  The ones who have been especially targeted by ISIS are denied sanctuary by the State Department.  The same question that is put to those in Syria was repeated by the Oregon shooter: “Are you a Christian?”  To answer in the affirmative has come to mean death.

Jeremiah the prophet spoke for God: “At one moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot, to pull down, or to destroy it; If that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it.  Or at another moment I might speak concerning a nation, or concerning a kingdom, to build up or to plant it; If it does evil in My sight by not obeying My voice, then I will think better of the good with which I had promised to bless it.” (Jeremiah 18:7-10)

The mass shootings are nothing more or less than the voice of God warning us that we cannot escape him.  If things are falling apart, then to divert the blame toward the false issue of guns is another evidence of our rebellion.  The remedy is to repent and to seek God.  Not the “bad guys,” whoever they may be.   It is for you and me to seek God.  And if enough of us own up to our sins and turn back, then God perhaps may reverse the judgment that is surely falling upon us.  Quickly, before another burst of gunfire may be directed at a group in which you are gathered.

Dr. Rick Perrin is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and Chairman of the Board of World Reformed Fellowship..  He writes a weekly blog called ReTHINK which may be accessed at www.rethinkingnews.wordpress.com. He may be contacted directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..