In the 11 days since the Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Georgia— the latest in a seemingly endless string of school shootings, resulting in four deaths — a WRPI news interview has haunted me every moment. On my TikTok page directly following the attack, multiple adolescent survivors were quick to thank God for their own lives. Marques Coleman, a 14-year-old student at the high school, admitted to reporters what he felt in the aftermath of the attack. “I just thank God that I wasn’t the one that got hit. In the midst of all of it happening, I was just thanking God because, you know, he had his hands around me.”
I too would be quick to praise God if I survived such a traumatic attack. I think back to March 27th, 2023, my twentieth birthday, and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, where I go to college. Vanderbilt University is 3.9 miles from Covenant. I prayed that day, thanking God that my classmates and I were not targeted. I prayed for the victims too, but I knew this small action was not enough. When my birthday came back around this year, I felt guilty thinking of those three children who died and will never get to grow old.
I found it unsettling that faith was often the first statement across multiple student interviews and media outlets, as faith alone has not yet stopped these tragedies. I have been wrestling with the convoluted relationship between religion and gun violence. The sad reality is that the surviving students simply got lucky.
As our legislators refuse to tighten gun laws, religion serves as a crutch. How have we as a nation come to place more faith in a spiritual force than our human legislators to address mass gun violence?
As a person of faith, I struggle with these comments from Apalachee’s students, because nothing is changing. I bought a bible at my university’s bookstore following church a few weeks ago. I believe in God, having been brought up in a Boston Catholic school for most of my elementary education. In fact, my religious upbringing emphasized civic engagement and public service would strengthen my relationship with God. I believe in God, but thoughts and prayers will not bring these victims back to their loved ones, or prevent these acts of violence from continuing. I wish God were a Senator so that He could implement stricter gun laws, but the intense political gridlock would likely swallow his good intentions. We must act, drawing on the power of our faith, for that to happen.
Faith is more than merely expressing guilt or empathy for these alarmingly common occurrences. God cannot prevent mass gun violence, but faith can strengthen our political endeavors to bring about change. It is human nature to hope that a force “stronger” than us, whether that be God or our politicians, will make the problem disappear, but this is simply an excuse for inaction. In truth, we are less powerless than we think. We must demand that the Senate takes action to minimize gun violence, transforming our prayers into petition signings and peaceful protests.
The Christianity that I believe in emphasizes personal freedom, in many cases closely aligning with the conservative defense of gun rights. But too many mass shootings occur weekly to justify the accessibility of weapons of mass destruction, even if in some cases owners purchase them for protection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number one cause of death in children and teens in this country is firearm-related injury. Children are dying at a catastrophic rate — what congregation could support that? My fellow Catholics and I believe children are a gift from God, yet their lives are taken by guns daily at the expense of individual freedoms.
It is our responsibility to God and our nation alike not simply to sit back and pray, but to look at the data for what it is. According to the Pew Research Center, sixty-one percent of Americans say that it is too easy to purchase a gun in the United States.
The majority of our country agrees on stricter background checks, yet legislators’ selfish outlooks on personal freedoms prevent legislation from moving forward. This stifles the growth of our adolescents and bestows the general public a greater responsibility to advocate for change.
Many die-hard Second Amendment advocates claim that the cause of gun violence deaths is not related to guns, yet how else was fourteen-year-old perpetrator Colt Gray able to end the lives of his classmates and teachers? He received an AR-15 capable of mass destruction as a Christmas gift, as if it were the latest Hess Truck model, on a holiday meant to celebrate the birth of Christ. No kid should carry such a deadly weapon, especially if the weapon was “God-given.”
The Second Amendment of the Constitution poses a threat that the average American cannot solve. My activism cannot pass a bill implementing stricter gun laws as easily as Congress can vote to pass it. The ink shed on that page by James Madison in 1791 represents the blood spilled on the floors of classrooms weekly around the country. I study American Politics and would be naive to think that the country will come close to a complete gun ban anytime soon, as polarized as we are. The inability of our politicians to compromise- much like the general public’s inaction following our thoughts and prayers- risks the lives of our youth and our educators. The lives of Mason Shermerhorn, Richard Aspinwall, Christina Irimie, and Christian Angulo were collateral in the war between political parties who refuse to entertain an opinion different from their own. Just as compromise is crucial to make strides in the realm of gun violence, so is taking action when we are not satisfied with the work of our political leaders. There is danger in relying on a savior alone to magically make gun violence disappear. The Bible commands its followers, “Thou shalt not kill,” (Exodus 20:13). As I have become more acclimated with my bible, a call to advocacy struck me. “Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you,” (Deuteronomy 16:20). I implore religious legislators and citizens alike to take a closer look at the document that guides their lives, as it is possible to redefine faith in a way that inspires meaningful change to finally tackle the epidemic of gun violence.
