Category Archives: JustConflict

Gun Safety

Gun Safety

Handgun lying over a copy of the United States constitution and the American flag.

Four years ago I wrote a proposal addressing gun violence in America and began to shop it around.  I was able to get a meeting with a senior staffer in the St. Louis office of Senator Claire McCaskill.  He was attentive and generous with his time, but in the end, said that, while he believed that my proposal would make us safer if implemented, it was a political non-starter.  I am hoping the political will has shifted enough to allow consideration of this perspective on and strategy for addressing gun violence.

I am Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson.  I am the Executive Director of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution in St. Louis, MO. I have 40 years of experience addressing violent conflict in human systems.  The collected wisdom of this work is something we now teach under the banner JustConflict. One of the basic principles is that a strategy for addressing conflict will arise as an expression of a definition of the problem.  How we define the problem determines what will occur to us to do about it.  

When the problem is simple, there will only be one best way to define the problem.  When the problem is complex [what social planners call a “wicked” problem] there are many valid ways to define the problem and no best way.  But practically speaking, we want to select a definition of the problem that allows us to solve it. We have been defining the problem of “gun violence” in ways that do not allow us to solve it.  

Indeed, the dominant voices are highly polarized and end up reinforcing resistance to each other.  If I say there are too many guns, anyone who owns one will imagine that “they are going to come and take away my guns.”  When Obama became President, guns sales went up. “I better get mine now while I can.”

Resolution works better when we focus on what we all need, rather than the understandable attending to where we disagree   We work better when we work together.

So I suggest a shift in our focus on the problem.  I am not saying we shouldn’t do things like background checks and waiting periods, but I don’t really see them as being all that effective in the long run. 

We don’t agree on whether more guns will make us safer, but we do agree that we want everyone to be safe.  Let’s build on that.

There are some folks who think no one should possess a lethal weapon and there are some folks who believe that everyone should.  Those are the two extremes. Most folks believe that there are some who should never have a gun, and some who must carry them to keep the rest of us safe.  No one is saying that all of the patients in the psych hospital should have a gun and very few say law enforcement should disarm.

Most will agree that there is such a thing as a responsible gun owner.  It is possible for someone to possess firearms and to use and store them in a manner that is safe.  As long as only responsible gun owners can possess a weapon, we will be safe.

Is it possible to determine who is and who is not such a person?  Are there ways to discern who is a “good guy with a gun?”

We probably don’t yet know how to figure that out, but I think we have large agreement that we need to figure that out, and to then be sure that no one who is not so identified has the right to possess a lethal weapon.

I am shifting the focus here from who owns the gun to who possesses the gun. If you are to legally possess a firearm in the public arena, on your person, in your car, at the shooting range, or hunting in the wilds, you must be certified as a “responsible gun owner.”  We are shifting the focus from ownership to possession and from gun rights to gun responsibilities. You may be able to go to Walmart and purchase a gun but you can’t carry it out of the store without having demonstrated that you can possess it safely.

Most Americans agree, I believe, that someone who cannot demonstrate that they can possess a gun safely has no right to do so. Instead of it being society’s responsibility to remove the right from someone who is dangerous, it is the person’s responsibility to prove that they are safe.

The question that remains then is, how do we know who is safe with a firearm?

Ultimately, of course, we cannot know.  But we want to have social policy that will reliably move us in the direction of reducing the chance that someone who is not safe will have access to a firearm. This is the goal I think we can all agree on.

But there is a catch [isn’t there always].  Who gets to decide who is a responsible gun owner and how do they decide?  

This is where my proposal starts to make folks uncomfortable. Some think this has to rest with the government, whether State or Federal.  No other entity has to authority to make this stick. And some don’t trust the government and so if it is involved they will oppose it. “I don’t want any government entity knowing anything about my guns.”

What we can then do is to have a law that gives the government the power to enforce a determination that is made by a public organization.  The public entity has the task of discerning who is safe and the government enforces that determination.

One last piece.  How is the system to be accountable for public safety?  How do we apportion criminal and civil liability when a bad guy with a gun uses it?

If someone who possesses a firearm uses it with criminal intent, and they were able to get possession without having first been certified, then this is a criminal matter for which law enforcement is responsible.  If however they were certified by a public organization, then that organization is civilly liable. [This is in addition to the criminal and civil liability of the bad actor.]

If I want to buy a shotgun to go hunting and I go into a local store to buy one, the sales person will ask if I am certified to carry a shotgun.  If I say no, he is going to tell me that he will gladly sell it to me but he can’t let me carry it out of the store. I have to first prove that I have proper certification.  If he allows me to, then he is in violation of the law and he faces penalties.

So I go online and find a company that offers certification.  Think insurance company here. They want to sell to me but they are going to make sure that I know what I am doing because otherwise they are going to face lawsuits if I screw up.  They send me to a company that does firearm safety training. This is like the companies that train people to drive a motorcycle. In most states you need special training to get a driver’s license to use a motorcycle.

I get the training and take the diploma to the certification/insurance company and they write me a policy and I take it to the gun store and they sell me a shotgun.  But, oh, I say, while I am here, I think I’ll get an AR-15. And the store owner says, let me see your certification. Oops, no, you aren’t certified for an automatic rifle.

If I already have a gun collection and I don’t want to get certified I don’t have to… as long as I don’t take them out of the house.  If I want to loan my son my shotgun, and he isn’t certified, then I am criminally liable for transferring possession to someone without certification.

The safety trainer is accountable to the certifying agent to be sure that students  learn what they need to know. The certification company makes sure that they have covered all the bases.  Maybe they require recertification periodically. Maybe they revoke certification in the event of an Adult Order of Protection.  Maybe they want to do a more thorough background check. They certainly don’t want to be civilly liable for Parkland or El Paso.

The pitch is that we are balancing gun rights with gun responsibilities.  We are affirming that there are responsible gun owners and that they can help create public safety by working to identify each other and to weed out those who cannot be trusted to safely carry a lethal weapon.  We do this by allowing public corporations and associations to certify who is safe with which firearms. We are not getting the government involved in the control of who carries what gun, but we are trusting law enforcement to enforce the laws.

Oh, and then there is the Second Amendment.  There will be a court case [probably many of them] that says that the requirement that one must be certified to possess a firearm is unconstitutional.

The wording of the Second Amendment is a bit odd.  It reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

If I may be permitted to paraphrase the wording without, I believe, altering its meaning but in fact making it clearer we might read it as, “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed because the security of a free State depends upon a well regulated Militia.”

About this reference to a Militia, the Supreme Court held in DC vs. Heller that, ““The “militia” comprised all males [sic] physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense…” and that the reason for this provision is “…so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.”

A militia is thus an organization that identifies and organizes persons so that they may act in concert for the common defense for the security of a free State.  It is not a gang or posse or band of vigilantes. Certain paramilitary organizations have used the term “militia” to refer to themselves. As a result, many folks don’t think of a militia as making them safer.  

I am hoping we now have the political will to say that the right to keep and bear Arms is one that rests upon the need for the security of the people, and that being a member of an organization that certifies one’s ability to act safely is the modern equivalent of a well regulated Militia.

Self-centered or Centered in Self

I have long argued that there is a very important distinction to be made between being self-centered and being centered in one’s self. The former is evidence of personal dysfunction and the latter is evidence of healthy functioning.  

This is true for us personally but it is also true for the church.  We are so afraid of being self-centered that we lose sight of the importance of paying attention to our own interiors; by which I mean the relationships we form with each other, and the ways we make decisions together.

As we begin to pay more and more attention to how we are with each other, how we treat each other in general, but especially how we treat each other when there is a decision to be made, we discover that we are in the habit of deferring to dominance hierarchies.  We tend to assume that the decision should be made by whomever is in charge. And even when we all get a say in what we are going to do, it is “the majority” who will prevail. Those in the minority, those at the margins, even if they are the ones who will ultimately implement the decision, their input may not even be sought, but it will certainly not prevail.

This is not the way God makes decisions.  This is not how God participates in and is expressed by creation. This is not the way to justice.

In the conversation We Should Talk about the future of the church we consider, among other things, the question of how we make decisions together.  We look at how God creates and imagine what it might be like if we were to model our process on how God arises.  We choose holism over dualism; holarchy over hierarchy; inclusion and diversity and complexity, over exclusion and uniformity and simplicity.

Interpersonal Nonviolence

Create constructive conversations about hard issues in personal relationships

Workshop on Interpersonal Nonviolence

Saturday, March 16, 2019 from 9:00 – 4:00

at 6454 Alamo Ave, St. Louis MO, 63105,

  • In memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s life and ministry
  • In the tradition of Satyagraha or Soul Force as taught by Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma
  • Two years after the inauguration of our 45th President
  • In an increasingly polarized political climate

We gather to explore the nature of nonviolence, not as an alternative political strategy, but as a spiritual discipline for creating what the world needs while creating what we need.

Each participant is encouraged to come with a conflicted relationship in mind.  We will use lecture and large group conversation together with journaling and small group support to apply the principles of nonviolence to what seems to be an intractable conflict.

The leader is Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson, the Director of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution and the author of Just Conflict: Transformation through Resolution.

The fee for the workshop is $100.  Snacks will be provided.  The workshop is limited to eight persons.

Register Here

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi

JustConflict as a Contemplative Practice

The origins of JustConflict as a discipline do not go back to the intention of deepening spiritual awareness. It arose out of a curriculum I designed for working with abusive men. It was only as I clarified the practices and applied them to a broader audience that I discovered their potential as a contemplative practice.

We normally think of contemplation as closely considering something. A contemplative practice is something we do over and over in which we focus on a sound or thought or object or our breath or on a sensation or collectively on a chant or text. We normally do this in solitude or in the context of a small and safe community.

JustConflict starts in the most opposite of places. The object of our attention is the thing that bothers us the most in the relationship that is, at times, the most trying. One member of the Living School recently named the mother of her step-son as one of her teachers. This was not because she is so calm and wise but because she has the power to cause so much distress in her family and pain in her heart.

Our starting point is with a persistent pattern of conflict in a significant relationship. These are the places that have the greatest potential for our transformation. This is the place where I most want things to change. But it is also not a place of calm but of turmoil. This is not a place of clarity but of confusion. This is not me at my best but at my worst.

How then can this be a contemplative practice, even a form of contemplative prayer? Let us consider what contemplation is more from the perspective of what it does than what it looks like. What is the impact of contemplation?

It helps us know what truly is. It grounds us in reality. It connects us to ourselves in a manner that allows us to be more fully connected to all that is around us. It may be a kind of conversation in which we experience conversion to a more fully true and complete expression of who we are, who we are created to be.

This conversation is one which we try to have with the fullest and purest expression of divine love. But the energy and the intelligence which gives rise to all that is is present in all that is. So we can have that conversation with anyone or anything at any time. And if the goal of this conversation is conversion, then the best time and context in which to have it is in the one where I most want things to be different. It is when I am the most raw, on my last nerve, most wounded, vulnerable, frantic, and confounded.

At the Retreat: The Practice of Presence we will be sitting in silence, and chanting, and focusing on movement and breath. But we will also each select a persistent pattern of conflict in a significant relationship and discover a way of being that will reliably create what we need such that we don’t require or expect that others will change but such that we will be creating what they need as well.

Mutually Assured Destruction in the Middle East

One cannot help but be heartbroken by the news from the Middle East.  The violence seems so senseless from this distance.  And while I have been more exposed to the plight of the Palestinians, and have good friends in Israel who are actively seeking to change the hearts and minds of Israelis and with them the policies of the Israeli government, I have recently come across a couple of accounts of the perspective of Israeli Jews who speak eloquently about what it is like to live in such close proximity to those who are committed to your destruction.

So I wrote a couple of short paragraphs on my Facebook wall about something the devout Muslims in the Arab states surrounding Israel could do that would be a non-violent response to the conflict.  They could assure their Jewish brothers and sisters that, in keeping with the teachings of the Koran and the spirit of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, that they support the right of Israel to exist and for its citizens of whatever faith to live in peace.  Indeed there are a great many Muslims who hold to just such a position.

It was not my intention to choose sides.  I was just pointing out that the otherwise non-violent tactics of public demonstrations and calls for divestiture against Israeli action against Palestine don’t acknowledge what Muslim Arabs all around the state of Israel are doing that create the tension.   There are some fundamental problems here that can be easily seen if not easily addressed.

From the perspective of JustConflict, the first best thing we can do to address persistent conflict in significant relationships is to stop doing what creates the problem.  There are a good many things we routinely do that move us away from what we need.  Most of them are things we do because in some way our society has taught us that this is what one should do.  First among them is that we are told by sports, politics, and what passes for our justice system that we can create what we need by making others lose.

Of course this never works and we know it.  If I have a conflict with you and I do something to address it which makes you fear that I am trying to make you lose, you will respond by trying to make me lose.  So I will try to make you lose.  And so we both lose.  But no one gets what they need, with the possible exception of the team owners, the party leaders, and the lawyers.

What the Muslim Arabs that surround Israel are doing that constructs the tension is that they hold as their fundamental political goal the eradication of the State of Israel.  However understandable this may be in the light of the oppression they have experienced, it is the central thing that Israelis point to as the justification, no, the necessity of their violence.

We know that we cannot make others change…we cannot cause them to choose what we want them to choose.  Nevertheless, this knowledge does not stop us from trying to change them.  And for our efforts we get feelings of frustration.  We become helpless and hopeless.

If instead we ask if there is anything about the current situation that is so troubling to us that we are willing to change ourselves, then we begin to discover a new way of being that allows for genuine transformation.

This is not just something the Palestinians can do.  The Israelis can see that their insistence that they have a right to build settlements on disputed land is tantamount to saying that Palestine doesn’t have a right to exist as a sovereign state.  They are taking what they see as Arab bad behavior and using it to give them the right to behave badly.  Each makes choices to cause the other to lose.

I am not denying anyone’s right to defend themselves. I am saying that doing what causes the other to lose, or even to fear losing, makes us lose.

When instead we act in our own interests to create what we genuinely need, we will necessarily also be acting in ways that create what the other needs.  But when we are so hurt and scared and angry that we can only focus on the destruction of the other, then everyone loses.

JustConflict and the Law of Three

Back before I started calling this method JustConflict I wrote an essay about how it works in relation to the spiritual principle known as The Law of Three.  Here is a link to the pdf.[vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_button title=”Creative Conflict Resolution and the Law of Three” target=”_blank” color=”skincolor” btn_effect=”colortoborder” showicon=”withouticon” icon=”crown” iconposition=”left” size=”wpb_regularsize” href=”http://www.creativeconflictresolution.org/jc/The%20Law%20of%20Three%20and%20Creative%20Conflict%20Resolution%20for%20pdf.pdf”]

Getting into Conflict

One of the goals of the Peacemaker Fellowship is to help local congregations identify and address the conflicts that arise such that they can fully resolve them and strengthen the bonds of fellowship in the church.  For this reason some folks are surprised that the Introduction to Peacemaker Training focuses so much on individual development and personal conflicts.  

This is the first in a series of posts about the relationship between our own work on conflict in our personal lives and our ability to help others address conflict in theirs.  My goal here is to clarify some principles so that participants can better appreciate why working on themselves prepares them to help others. 

 

Peacemaker training starts with understanding our own conflicts.  We name, address, and move to resolve our own persistent patterns of conflict in our most significant relationships.  But folks ask, “What about conflicts in organizations?  How does this help solve conflicts in a local congregation?”

Two central principles apply.

  • We can’t solve a problem unless it is ours.
  • Even my Self as what I think of as an individual is a complex organization.

Owning the Problem

One of the questions we address early on in the Introduction to Peacemaker Training is the question “Do you want to be responsible?”  This, of course, is a trick question.  We do and we don’t.  It depends on what we mean by responsible.

This is a critical issue because I can’t solve a problem that is not in some sense my own.  If I don’t own it, I have no power to affect it.

Because we are all beloved children of God and because we are called to love and serve each other and because of the oneness of all Creation and the holographic nature of being: every problem is my problem.  But I have no leverage to address it, much less solve it, if I don’t have a clear sense of how it is mine.

But be clear.  This is not, “Step aside everyone, I am here to fix this mess,” but rather, “In what sense is this a problem for me?  What about this circumstance causes discord within me?”

When my children are squabbling: is this a chance for them to learn how to get along and I should allow them to work it out or is this a situation of danger where I as someone who cares for these beings is called to intervene?  I have to be able to know myself, to know what I need, to know whether to act and how.

Addressing the conflict requires that I get into it and see it from the inside.

Organizations as Complex Individuals

I had a professor in graduate school in the first course I took on conflict resolution who insisted that conflicts in groups were a different phenomenon than conflicts within persons or in intimate relationships.  He insisted that groups are so much more complex that they require a different paradigm to understand them.  Given his prestige I have tried for the last 30 years to observe what he was talking about and I have come to believe that he just underappreciated how complex people are.

The more we get to know ourselves the more we recognize that we are not just sometimes “of two minds.”  We are all very complex and often very conflicted.

Anxiety is not just a low-grade fear; it is the physiological artifact of being pulled and pushed in two directions at once.  An essential part of helping systems in conflict is to present what we call “a non-anxious presence.”  This capacity to be present to others without being overwhelmed by their anxiety is essential to being with them in ways that help them understand themselves and make choices that genuinely move them toward what they need.

As we get to know the parts of us that are in conflict and to see how normal that is we relax and feel less anxious.  For this reason it is essential that we address our own conflicts so we can help others with theirs.

The Central Question

In a phone conversation with a potential client I asked what I have found to be the pivotal question in determining whether I can be of help.

“Is there something happening in your life right now that is so bothersome that you are willing to change what you are doing?”

He is obviously a smart guy and he laughed in recognition that this is his issue.  He would really like to find a therapist that is so good that the therapist will teach him how to get others to change.

The problem is not that we want others to change.  Of course we would like them to be different.  The problem is that we put our energy into getting others to change.  We have a very low chance of success with that.  If they want to be different in just the ways we want them to be different we will see what looks like success.  But if they don’t want to be who we want them to be, or can’t be, or want to thwart us more than they want to please themselves… for any one of a dozen reasons they may not be who we want them to be.  This does not stop us from trying to changing and–for our trouble–what we get is frustration.  We feel helpless and hopeless.

As futile as this is there is a more dire consequence.  When we focus our attention on getting others to change we divert our attention from transforming our own behavior.  We take our attention off of what would create safety and satisfaction for ourselves and instead waste our energies on doing the impossible.  So ask yourself…

Close to Launch

I had told some friends that this site would be ready by the end of June 2014 and then I got really bogged down in creating the site.  It is now close to prime time and I am ready to return to writing.  I think I might just make it.