Recently on "The View" the panel was discussing some recent natural disaster and one of the hosts asked "Why does God allow this to happen?" It is a question that comes up after virtually every tragedy, large and small. Why would a just and loving God allow this? All too often, the question is not posed by someone who searches for an answer but by someone seeking to elicit a specific answer - "Because God does not exist." Or, if He does exist, He sure isn't doing us any favors. To put it more crassly, "Why do we even have a God if He never does anything good for us?"
When tragedy strikes and we are looking for answers where none exist, we humans have a hard time dealing with it. We like answers. We seek closure. So, the question seems natural. Why, God, didn't you stop this?
I am not God, and I cannot presume to speak on His behalf, but I think the answer to that question would be "How would you know if God did prevent a disaster from happening?" If a mudslide in Cambodia is miraculously aborted because God caused the rain to fall over the ocean rather than on the mountain, who would let us know? The Almighty doesn't have a PR firm issuing press releases. Likewise, if a drunk driver were delayed 5 seconds via divine intervention - just long enough to prevent him from hitting a bunch of school children - would you ever even know?
Of course not.
Likewise, with handguns, the only time they ever make the news is when they fail to protect us. When some mad man goes into a mall or restaurant and shoots a dozen people, it makes the news and we all ask the question of why we even allow people to own guns. But when a mass murder is stopped in its tracks by a citizen with a gun who disables the attacker, we never ask the question of why every citizen doesn't own a gun? We never ask the question because the incident doesn't make a big splash in the news. Consider this: if some of the teachers at Columbine High School had been armed and were able to thwart Harris and Klebold from carrying out their massacre, would any of us even remember the event ten years later?
The ironic thing is that the feel-good measure we imposed to make our kids safe at school actually endangers them. By declaring our schools to be "Gun Free Zones" we have alerted every nut job that if they try to harm any of our kids at school, they will meet no armed resistance. There have been far more shootings at banks than there have been at schools. Yet we don't dare deem banks to be "Gun Free Zones" because we know what the consequences would be: the lack of deterrence would be an open invitation to be robbed. Banks do not employ armed guards in the hopes that they will shoot bad guys trying to rob them. They employ armed guards with the thought of preventing a robbery in the first place. If the government's theory of "Pass a gun-free zone law and you will prevent gun crimes" worked, a lot of bank guards would be unemployed.
Maybe I am just one of those rednecks that President Obama accused of clinging to his God and his guns (I don't own a gun, by the way). But I am grateful to the protection that each has offered me, even when I am unaware of that protection.
Although that irritatingly vague word "faith" must inevitably be employed where matters of God's existence are concerned, practically I've invoked "string theory" or "relativity theory" as evidence that something can exist which is virtually impossible for me to understand, though I recognize that people do understand them to varying degrees.