My social media feed is full of sadness, anger, and despair at the news of the most recent mass shooting. This time the victims are children in an elementary school in Texas. Texas leaders offer “grieving” and “mourning,” and all I can hear is “thoughts and prayers.” Without committed action, thoughts and prayers become an excuse for doing nothing.
We are so far past “thoughts and prayers” at this point. We should have moved from thoughts and prayers for the victims to action to reduce the violence in the aftermath of Columbine. Actually, we should have done so sometime in my childhood when Malcom and Martin and JFK and RFK were gunned down and when violent crime rates soared.
When guns became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States, many of us were compelled to wonder, along with the poet Tess Taylor, if we love our guns more than we love our children. If it were otherwise would guns be more difficult to purchase than baby formula? We accept violence as a cost of freedom, and refuse to examine the roots of that violence in a culture of White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and the myth of redemptive violence. Meanwhile, our children keep dying. Every day in the United States 12 children die from gun violence. That is one Uvalde every two days.
Biblical prophets did not stop at calls for “thoughts and prayers” in the face of systemic injustice that wounded the most vulnerable members of their society. They called for swords to be beaten into plowshares. They called for lamentation, repentance, and faithful action to restore what had been rent asunder. They called for sacrifice, not merely in liturgical acts of burnt offerings, but also in communal acts designed to weave communities together.
They called for justice to roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. In other words, they called for action. In the face of community torn apart by injustice, they called on the community to do justice.
The fabric of our society has been violently torn apart again and again and again for decades. In the years since the 1999 Columbine shootings more than 300,000 U.S. students have faced gun violence while at school. Over that same time, the United States has lost almost one million lives to gun violence, more than half of them to suicide.
Those numbers are overwhelming. In the face of shooting upon shooting upon shooting it is tempting to surrender to despair as we anticipate the next headline covering the next mass shooting or the next family in our community to lose a loved one to gun violence. It is certainly good to pause and pray, but to stop there is neither respectful to the dead nor faithful to the God to whom we lift our prayers.
My prayer is, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy upon us.”
That prayer and any other prayer is empty if offered without committed action to prevent gun violence. Thoughts and prayers are worthless unless they inform and describe our actions.
No single action will solve this national scourge, but there are actions available that can make our communities safer. Fortunately, many of the actions we can take do not depend upon actions of elected officials who are captive to the idolatry of gun rights. That doesn’t mean let your elected officials off the hook when they refuse even to consider legislative efforts to reduce gun violence. Vote. Get loud. Demand reform.
But don’t wait on elected officials to act before taking other steps.
PPF has launched the Guns to Gardens campaign, in part, to take power back into our own hands. When our legislators fail to act, we can. We can dismantle guns, taking them off the street, one by one by one.
There are plenty of other groups – faith-based and secular – working across the country to reduce gun violence. There is no single answer, and no simple fix. But all of the answers depend on us to act. If you come at this from the perspective of faith, ground your actions in prayer and be thoughtful as you act. I pray that none of us stops at thoughts and prayers.
David Ensign, Interim PPF Executive Director
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