gun laws
Image of a target at a gun range.
As a Black woman, I’ve always known that my skin color could get me killed. As I watched Capitol rioters carry the Confederate flag through the Capitol on Jan. 6, I knew the danger was more present than ever. In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, the increase in white nationalist terrorism made me realize that I needed to take drastic measures to ensure my safety.
A photo of a yard-sign declaring “We believe / Black Lives Matter / Love is love / Feminism is for everyone / No human being is illegal / Science is real / Be kind to all.” Via Alamy.
My shtick on Twitter is taking pictures of myself with kitschy signs that I find wherever I go. You know the signs I’m talking about. They are the signs that embody the motto of “Live. Laugh. Love.” If you go to your local Hobby Lobby, there is an aisle dedicated to this, um, décor.
This year has been difficult beyond description for so many people. While the COVID-19 pandemic has understandably occupied front pages across the country and around the globe for much of the past six months, another destructive wave continues to fester, creating so much pain and grief: our national plague of gun violence, which claims 100 lives a day. Together, the two crises have become a toxic combination.
Image via Reuters/Kanishka Singh
We must urge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has had Rep. Clyburn’s House-passed bill to address this loophole sitting on his desk for a year, to act. And, for the duration of the pandemic, we must urge governors to close this loophole at the state level to give law enforcement enough time to complete background checks. In doing so, we can save countless lives and prevent countless families from experiencing the suffering and heartache that I feel every day.
Through a spokesman, Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signaled he will veto the measure if it reaches his desk. “The governor is ready to work with the General Assembly to promote responsible gun ownership, but he does not believe more guns in more locations is a solution to the real problem of gun violence,” Northam spokesman Brian Coy said.
“Somebody else walked up and said, ‘Can I see it?'” Parks said. “He pulled it back out and said, ‘With this loaded indicator, I can tell that it’s not loaded.'”
He pulled the trigger.
The conversation isn’t just about guns, although that’s certainly a huge part of it. We need to look at the bigger picture of how we’ve made violence our norm, how we endorse and encourage it in so many ways.
Man carries his sidearm to support the permitless carry law going into effect on July 1. txking / Shutterstock.com
Gun violence has become so ubiquitous in the U.S. that it is changing the very way we talk about our country. The names of our cities and towns have become shorthand terms for gun death: Orlando, Newtown, Dallas, Ferguson, Baton Rouge, Columbine, Aurora.
In Dawn Cherie Araujo’s article, “Grace-Filled Moments” (Sojourners, January 2015), she explores the rising gun violence in Indianapolis and the ways local churches have taken stands to support families and rise up against the prevalence of grief in their communities.
What are groups like the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis facing as they combat gun trafficking and violence? Check out the interactive infographic below and learn about the United States’ tumultuous relationship with guns. What are your state’s gun laws?
Praying statue, antoniomas / Shutterstock.com
Any right-thinking stranger on our shores must read our daily news and think our nation has gone mad. We have cultivated the ability to end lives quickly; and yet we are continually surprised when our fellow citizens use the tools we have devised for exactly the purpose for which we invented them. Come to think of it, I think we’ve gone mad, too.
But our madness is not one that can be cured by laws alone. Laws can help to restrain us, and can help by making it a little less easy for us to find ourselves armed for murder. But we need something more, something that churches are better equipped to offer than legislatures are.
What we need right now is a richer moral imagination. We need better stories to tell ourselves, stories about the kind of people we could be. We need, more than anything, to learn to help one another to do the hard work of choosing not to pull the trigger.
Young boy atop father's shoulders at vigil for Martin Richard, victim of Boston bombing. Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
I hear it over and over again both during my conversations on the road, and as I skim the headlines each day, that we are in a battle for the common good.
I learned about the Boston bombings as my plane landed in Portland, Ore., traveling for an 18-city book tour to spark a conversation on “the common good.” As I read and watched more about the tragedy, there unfolded such a stark and brutal contrast between the explicit intent to kill, hurt, and maim others, and the actions of those who rushed toward the blast, risking their own lives to help the wounded. One act of vicious violence was aimed to destroy the common good and create a society based on fear. The others displayed the highest commitment to redeem the common good and insist that we will not become a nation based on fear, but on mutual service and support.
When real or imagined grievances combine with rage, religious fundamentalism, political extremism, mental illness, or emotional instability, we lose the common good to dangerous violence, fear, and deep distrust in the social environment. But when grievances lead to civil discourse, moral engagement, and even love and forgiveness, different outcomes are possible.
President Obama signs executive orders on new gun law proposals with children. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
When I was a little girl, my mother and I prayed together every night:
Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
And then I would ask God to bless a list of people who were on my mind.
Every night I spoke about my own death, but death was not real. It never occurred to me that I would die or that my parents would die.
One day when I was in the fifth grade, we heard gun shots outside our school. Our teachers did not let us go outside for recess that day because a woman had been killed, caught in the crossfire of a domestic dispute between her son and his wife. By the time school was out, the body had been removed; there was no yellow crime scene tape. There was still blood on the ground to mark the spot of this tragic death. The next day it would be washed away.