I live in Raleigh, NC which is nowhere near Littleton, Colorado, but my life was forever changed by the shootings at Columbine High School. It was as if the bullets fired at that school flew thousands of miles across the country and landed in my own backyard. My two youngest children were 12 and 15 at the time, and suddenly they were afraid to go to school. I ached knowing that my children would never again walk the halls in complete confidence that they were safe; they would never again witness a fight in the cafeteria without hoping that no one had a gun; they would see weird, loner kind of kids and wonder if they harbored violent fantasies. I had no reassuring answer for my children when they asked if anything like Columbine could happen at their schools. Of course it could.
After Columbine, I had a really specific reason for wanting to do something about gun violence. I went to Washington, DC on Mother’s Day 2000 for the Million Mom March and helped organize a local MMM chapter. I learned about the Second Amendment, gun laws and the gun lobby. I learned statistics about gun deaths and injuries– but it wasn’t until I met mothers and fathers whose sons had been shot and killed, young men who had been paralyzed by a bullet in their spines, young widows whose husbands had been shot – it wasn’t until I talked with them and cried with them that I began to realize that gun violence isn’t just a thorny legal issue or a hot button political issue. Gun violence is a justice issue – one that my faith challenges me to not to ignore.
I believe every person is created in God’s image, that we are all God’s children, and that each gun death diminishes my greater human family. I believe that God is a God who desires peace, and that each gun death threatens the divine vision of a peaceable kingdom. I believe the first commandment which says “You shall have no other gods before me” and I believe that guns are revered as idols in our culture. I believe that the killing that goes on in our country is an affront to God who loves us and created us. That’s why I’m now the chaplain for a group called ‘Vigils Against Violence’ which I’ll tell you about next time…
