On one otherwise unexceptional June day nine years ago--a full 10 months before the mass murder at Columbine--the Presbyterian Church (USA) suggested its members might consider "intentionally work[ing] to remove handguns and assault weapons from our homes and communities."
Not hunting rifles, mind you. This wasn't a statement aimed at sportsmen or women. Just assault weapons, as would be used at Columbine, and handguns, maybe like those the news media says were used in yesterday's killings. The church is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the nation, with around 3 million members. I use the verb 'suggest' because the statement came as a resolution from its General Assembly. It wasn't binding, just what a majority of the GA's commissioners (its voting members) thought a good idea.
As I read it again now, hours after watching the grainy, jumpy video taken by a Virginia Tech student showing police dashing about a campus while gunshots explode inside an academic building, I'm also struck by the resolution's second part, which asked Presbyterians "to create sanctuaries of safety for our children, so that all of our children may come to identify and value themselves and others as the precious children of the family of God they are..." Maybe it's partly because I'm a sentimentalist, or maybe because I'm a parent, but I like that last phrase.
No, the resolution is not an explanation of how "senseless tragedies" occur. Nothing so ambitious as the ubiquitous "where was God" question. Or the equally potent and secular, "How could an individual do this..." But it's as good a response to senseless tragedies as I've seen.
Anyway, that's how my faith tradition did it.
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