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Dear Parish Faithful,
"My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth." (Psalm 121:2)
Another Gun-Related Massacre - Only ten days ago, we were disheartened to hear of ten people being killed by a mass shooter in Buffalo, NY. Today, the news is even more sickening - if that is possible - because as many as nineteen children and three adults have been brutally massacred in a school by yet another mass shooter who, on his eighteenth birthday, was able to walk into a store and purchase two "assault rifles." As well-intentioned as it is, does anyone think that the parents of the dead children are consoled by our limp assurance that "you are in our prayers?" This time the shooter was killed at the scene. That will probably make discovering the motive more difficult, unless he left behind clear reasons behind his rampage.
Be that as it may, here is yet another infamous event that once again forces us to face the fact that mass shootings in America are on such a scale that these shootings simply have no comparison with any other country. Not even close. More specifically, school shootings are almost exclusively an American phenomenon. We can no longer deny the connection between these mass shootings and the fact that America has the most permissive gun laws in the developed world. There is a certain fatalism in not addressing this madness. I understand that there are those who will disagree with that assessment, but there is ample data that supports this position.
This is from the journalist David Frum:
Every other democracy makes some considerable effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, and dangerous people away from guns. For many years—and especially since the massacre at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School almost a decade ago—the United States has put more and more guns into more and more hands: 120 guns per 100 people in this country. The years of the pandemic have been the years of the greatest gun sales in U.S. history: almost 20 million guns sold in 2020; another 18.5 million sold in 2021. No surprise, those two years also witnessed a surge in gun violence: the spectacular human butchery of our recurring mass slaughters; the surge of one-on-one lethal criminality; the unceasing tragic toll of carelessness as American gun owners hurt and kill their loved ones and themselves.
Here are some sobering words from Megan Ranney, described as "Dean of Brown University and emergency physician with public health expertise in gun safety." These passages were found in an article written yesterday in response to this horrific tragedy, entitled, "Backward and Downward," by the journalist Katherine J. Wu. Ranney stated the following about the effect of gun-related homicides on the families of such victims:
"There is almost no way to describe to someone not in health care what it is like to let a family member know that their loved one was lost to a gunshot,” Ranney told me. “The ripple effects on families, on health-care providers, and on the larger community is almost incalculable. Bullet wounds hurt not just the person who has been shot, but everyone who surrounds them. It creates fear; it creates division.
Yet, Ranney does not despair, but is convinced that these mass shootings can be at least reduced with proper attention and resolve:
“We know that change is possible,” she said, if the country can reduce the availability of firearms to people who will misuse them. Ranney drew a parallel to the plunge in fatal motor-vehicle crashes that’s played out over the past half century. “We made a choice to not accept the car-crash deaths at the rate that they were at,” she told me. “We’ve done that through sustained effort on a federal, state, but also local level in terms of policy, education, and research. This is not an impossible problem. This is not hopeless. But it requires a commitment to do more than just talk about it in the wake of a mass shooting. It requires a commitment to address it every single day.”
This will take commitment and resolve. And that is something that we can and should pray for.
And, again, from David Frum:
Whether any particular killer proves to be a racist, a jihadist, a sexually frustrated incel, or a randomly malignant carrier of sorrow and grief, can Americans ever break the pattern of empty thoughts, meaningless prayers, and more and worse bloodshed to follow?
We call Christ the Prince of Peace. Christ taught us, "Blessed are the peacemakers ... " And we pray for the "peace of the whole world" in the Liturgy. There is no sentimental rhetoric in that title, in that teaching and in that petition. However, being immersed in a pattern of extreme violence can not only numb us to the horror of it all, but also weaken our commitment to peace, as "self-defense" becomes our default position in life. Not exactly a position that is found in the Gospel. Which is why, from a Christian perspective, there is something clearly incoherent in the bumper sticker formula "God and guns." Resisting that false formula in the context of American religious culture is an imperative first step toward resolving the terrible dilemma we find ourselves in.
