Ay, Caramba!
by Gila Hayes
I always enjoy the Friday Deals and 2A Updates that hit my email inbox from Ammo.com every week. I would probably be richer if I didn’t open and read it, but there’s something comforting about having several cases of carry ammo tucked away against shortages and ever-rising prices. I also scan the three or four little news bits with which the fun folks at Ammo.com lead their 2A Updates. A recent edition caught my eye with a study of deaths from “stray bullets.”
The wounds and fatalities attributed to celebratory gunfire are pretty sobering. My imagination serves up a scene from an old Western movie, when the outlaws gallop out of town hooting and hollering and shooting into the air. Today, police and medical reports show that New Year’s Eve continues to be marred by injuries and death and property damage from celebratory gun fire, not only in South America and the Middle East, but in the good old U.S.A., too.
While I view that as good reason to avoid crowded venues, whether celebratory or of a less positive nature, the bigger lesson is acknowledging that bad things happen, and not writing off the sound of gunfire with the weak explanation too often heard, “I thought it was just fireworks.” You know the difference – take action to escape to safety. While statistics suggest the likelihood of being killed by a “stray” bullet is small indeed, the percentage goes way up if you’re out in the open where that kind of foolishness is going on.
Thoughts On Charity
Will you allow me an off-topic rant? When I was a child growing up, individuals practiced charity and donating to relief efforts was a way of life. In addition to contributing when the collection plate was handed around, churchgoers tithed, giving 10% of their income to the church to support its ministries. Thus funded, churches sponsored missionary families to go abroad and help needy people. Children learned to practice charitable giving, even if only to put a nickle in the church collection plate, or volunteer on a food donation drive to serve Christmas dinner to poor families in town, or sorting and mending used clothing to be sent to overseas mission schools.
I got to thinking about the practice of charitable giving when the hue and cry over the Trump administration’s 90-day pause on the millions flowing out of the US Agency for International Development dominated the news in mid-February. Headlines, not surprisingly, featured HIV patients cut off from antiretroviral therapy, starving and sick people going without food and medicine given to impoverished nations – in short, all the charities to which individuals donated when I was growing up.
Faith-focused charities are only a few of the worthy causes I remember from childhood. On the secular side, ranchers in our community were generous in their support of youth programs like 4H and Future Farmers of America (FFA), and the community was quick to rally to round up housing, food and clothes for neighbors who lost everything in a fire or a weather catastrophe. Workers in the region’s open pit coal mines funded trusts and foundations to help families of fellow workers who suffered misfortune. Charity was close to home! Generosity was a mix of gratitude for help received when your own family was down combined with, I suspect, the unspoken prayer that disaster would pass by your door this year.
Imagine my shock last month when the church I grew up in publicized that its relief efforts in Africa and South America were “directly harmed” when the Trump administration paused USAID funding distributions. Turns out the church’s relief agency relied on over $60 million from USAID in 2023 for more than 60% of its budget. While I remember our family contributing to mission fundraising pleas during Bible school and church services, along going door to door and soliciting community support during fundraising drives, I do not remember the church depending on government funding 60 years ago. I was shocked to learn how dependent its mission efforts had become on the government collecting taxes on our earnings and redistributing that money as it pleases.
In striving to understand why we have allowed the government to steal the blessing of practicing charity individually, I realized Americans today have a much harder time opening their wallets for charities. Although GivingUSA.org reports that charitable donations rose a meager 1.3% in 2023, adjusted for inflation, that turns into negative numbers. “Notably, the number of donors has decreased, with small-dollar contributions (less than $500) experiencing the most significant drop,” notes the Giving Tuesday third quarter report.
I sought reports from several sources and viewpoints. Sure enough, Forbes.com admitted in a February 6 online article that the 135-year old United Way, once thought to be the biggest grass-roots charity ever, is struggling with falling donations, higher costs, and absent volunteers. A few months ago, the second half of Indiana Attorney Alex Ooley’s video blog Forge of Freedom introduced listeners to the famous speech Davy Crockett gave in Congress entitled, “Not Yours to Give,” the basis of one of the best Davy Crockett stories ever. It is retold at https://fee.org/resources/not-your-to-give/ which Alex narrates. Read or listen, but ponder the wisdom in those words.
I’ll close my rant with this observation: Charitable giving, while certainly benefiting the recipient, also does inestimable good for the giver. It takes us outside our own concerns and underscores that even in times of trouble and heartache, there often is far greater misery and need elsewhere. Giving what we can to alleviate another’s woes improves our mental and emotional health. I hope we can take the practice of forced charity away from the government and return to true individual charity.