By Larry Craig

Those who live in the Chicago area are used to hearing weekly reports on the gun violence from the previous weekend. Weekends are worse than weekdays, and hot weather just ups the totals dramatically.

These shootings are mostly black-on-black crime, and therefore they are not listed or prosecuted as hate crimes. It seems that hate crimes only apply when you hate people of other races or religions. It doesn’t count if you hate people of your own race. That’s absurd. It takes a lot of hate to gun down people, whether it’s one or 11.

Politicians focus their attention on guns. I.e., People kill because they have easy access to guns. But Chicago’s gun violence is mostly from street gangs. These same gangs have no problem flooding Chicago’s streets with illicit drugs. It shouldn’t be difficult for them to add guns to the drug shipments.

People kill because they do not value human life. Their anger and hatred impel them to do violence against other people.

You can’t fight hate with laws. Laws may stop a few people from expressing that hate, but there already are laws against shooting and killing people. You want to stop hate crimes, mass shootings, or any killing? You need to get people to love each other.

That may sound like a tall order here, but understand that gun violence is a relatively new problem in our country.

We forget that America has always had guns. The Founders called it “being armed,” an advantage “which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.” “The [other] governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” We were free because we were armed, and Europe was run by kings because the people were unarmed.

We forget that we used to be able to buy guns like you were buying a screwdriver at a hardware store. We used to have gun clubs in public high schools.

Guns weren’t a problem because we taught our kids, even in public schools, that you should love your neighbor as yourselves, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and, above all, do not kill.

Those are all from the Bible, which used to be a part of our public education for almost 200 years, until the Supreme Court said we couldn’t. You would think the people who wrote the First Amendment knew what they meant by it.

Love is a religious word. We don’t use it much in public circles today. We don’t talk about religion much in public either, but I don’t see any way out of this gun violence apart from it.

And not just any religion, either. Not all religions teach about loving our neighbors or doing unto others as we would have others do unto us.

It may take a generation to raise kids with love in their hearts rather than hate, but any other proposed solution is like trying to hold down a lid on boiling water with your hand. It may work for a while, but the boiling water will always spill over.

But what about the separation of church and state?

The separation of church and state as commonly understood means that the government must not bring God or religion into any of its policymaking discussions or into our public schools. It must treat all religions equally, and even to mention religion is showing favoritism of theism over atheism. So, practically speaking, we must act like an atheistic nation in order to be fully neutral to all religions.

But for those who know about the early days of our country, the establishment of religion meant having a national church run by the government, like they have in Europe. The Queen of England is the head of the Church of England. That’s what the First Amendment prohibits, not talking about, teaching about, or believing in God.

The Founders believed in the right to bear and carry arms because it is only when you have an armed populace that a people are able to remain free. The Founders also knew that you need a religious people who love their neighbors if you want the people to live in peace.