Reposted from the UCLA FirearmsRegProf List with permission.

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From: BIGOTRY, SYMBOLISM AND IDEOLOGY
IN THE BATTLE OVER GUN CONTROL
Don B. Kates, Jr.
(available all over the web)

Illustrative of anti-gun (but not pro-control) disapproval
of self-defense is a May 1977 article on guns published in
Engage-Social Action Forum, the magazine of the Board of Church
and Society of the United Methodist Church. The author, at the
time the magazine’s editor, avers that women should submit to
rape rather than do anything that might imperil a rapist’s life.
Rhetorically posing the question, “Is the Robber My Brother,”
Rev. Allen Brockway answers affirmatively, for although the
burglary victim or the

woman accosted in the park by a rapist is [not] likely
to consider the violator to be a neighbor whose safety
is of immediate concern *** [c]riminals are members of
the larger community no less than are others. As such
they are our neighbors or, as Jesus put it, our
brothers. . . . [Though violent criminals act
wrongfully,] it is equally wrong for the victim to
kill, save in those extremely rare circumstances when
the unambiguous alternative is one own’s death.

The views articulated by Reverend Brockway are neither
unrepresentative of the gun control movement nor uninfluential
within it. Indeed, the most senior of the national gun control
organizations, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (NCBH) is a
creation of the Board of Church and Society of the United
Methodist Church. NCBH’s national office is in the Methodist
Board’s Washington building and the Board was NCBH’s official
fiscal agent until 1976 when gun lobby complaints to the Internal
Revenue Service threatened the Church’s tax exemption. (NCBH has
recently changed its name to Coalition Against Gun Violence to
facilitate its current emphasis on banning rifles and shotguns as
well as handguns.)

Reverend Brockway’s language seems to concede that a woman
may shoot a rapist if she knows with certainty that he will kill
her. This concession is of special interest because another NCBH
affiliate, the Presbyterian Church USA, disagrees. Its official
position is that the handgun should be banned because a victim
may not take an attacker’s life under any circumstance, even if
she knows he will kill her after the rape. Testifying in a
Congressional gun control hearing in the middle 1980s, the
church’s representative, Rev. ——- Young, director of its
Criminal Justice Program, stated: “The General Assembly [of the
Presbyterian Church USA] has declared in the context of handgun
control and in many other contexts, that it is opposed to “the
killing of anyone, anywhere, for any reason.” Reverend Young
emphasized that the Presbyterian position is moderate in that it
seeks only to ban handguns, not hunting guns. Rifles and
shotguns are not condemned because the church sees them as owned,
as he put it, “by sports people.” They are different from
handguns whose purpose is self-defense. Making no distinction
between murderers and victims who lawfully defend themselves, the
Presbyterian Church USA categorically condemns handguns as
“weapons of death … that are designed only for killing.” In
the church’s view, “There is no other reason to own a handgun
(that we have envisioned, at least) than to kill someone with
it.”

As for attitudes towards guns in general, see:

http://www.pcusa.org/today/features/feat9905a.htm

which is from the website of the Prebyterian Church USA. Search for the
paragraphs below:

> “I firmly believe that civilized societies have every right to
regulate
>dangerous and lethal products,” says Tom Diaz of The Violence Policy
>Center in Washington, author of Making a Killing, a book about the
>business of guns in America.
>
> The church is on record as sharing his view. In 1996 the General
Assembly
>stated that “except for military and law enforcement use, further
>manufacture and sale of assault weapons and concealable handguns should
be
>prohibited.”

http://www.pcusa.org/wo/features/guns.htm

shows the PCUSA’s general policy toward guns.

You may also want to examine the text of Overture 96-19 and Overture
97-72
(both gun bans), which were once available online but are no longer.

If you check out the bottom of the page:

http://horeb.pcusa.org/crim_justice/gunpol98.htm

you will see that the PCUSA boasts that it continues to work with the
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which is the current name of the
National
Council to Ban Handguns. http://gunfree.org/csgv/csgvsumm.htm
reiterates
this relationship, as well as adding that:

The goal of CSGV is the orderly elimination of the private sale of
handguns and assault weapons in the United States. CSGV seeks to ban
handguns and assault weapons from importation, manufacture, sale and
transfer by the general American public, with reasonable exceptions made
for police, military, security personnel, gun clubs where guns are
secured
on club premises, gun dealers trading in antique and collectable
firearms
kept and sold in inoperable condition.

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils
in this world are to be cured by legislation.
– THOMAS B. REED (1886)