Oh, c'mon Episcopal Cafe. Couldn't you folks wait just a few days before launching into the gun debate for once? Let those families (some might even be readers) grieve and bury their dead before starting his up again. Those families deserve a better pastoral response than being used as objects in a national debate--by either side.

This was a helpful dose of reality. The gun debate has already been launched in full force, evidenced by my Facebook feed. Of course, I live in Oklahoma so I see what a lot of conservative friends are talking about.

Barbara Laufersweiler

"People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot – and killed – than those who are unarmed, a study of shooting victims in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found."

I hope the writer is offering this statement as an interesting fact and not in support of an argument against guns. Clearly, a small amount of logic can lead to two conflicting conclusions.

Alvah Whealton

Ann, like Kevin Matthews I take exception to your post and must challenge your comments and as pastorally inappropriate. Regardless of one's position on the issue on the ownership of firearms, using the pain and suffering of others as a sounding board is wrong. Our focus should be on the suffering of the victims and the healing that we can share through Christ.

I have a second point on which I take exception to your post and I would like to ask everyone in the Episcopal Church who reads this thread to look closely at the latest work of Diana Butler Bass: Christianity after Religion. In this book she draws on statistical information from several studies that investigated the relationship, and tension, between the general American public and organized religion. A significantly large number of the American population, I believe the number was close to 50%, identify themselves as spiritual but not religious. When this group was surveyed about their dis-taste for major denominational churches one of the top responses was an objection to putting political agendas ahead of faith.

Ann I am very confident that you are well intended in your post but your unintended consequences are to again discredit us in the eyes of those people to whom we should be reaching out. Both those victims to whom we should be reaching out in pastoral care and those persons seeking a spiritual home, who might otherwise have seen the Episcopal Church as a faith community worthy of their membership.

Please Ann, prayerfully rethink your position and your methodology.

Kevin and Victor - if you had read the articles I don't think you would not come to these patronizing conclusions. Or maybe you would but we disagree - that's all.

Victor and Kevin,

I wonder how soon after the sinking of the Titanic voices were raised demanding that passenger ships be equipped with adequate life boats.

Every mass murder using semi-automatic weapons wakens our nation briefly from our numbed complacency. When people are asking how an event like this could happen is the time to speak. Otherwise we'll continue to see almost as many Americans die annually of gun violence as were killed in the whole of the Viet Nam war.

Yes, the NRA may observe a politic quiet after an event like this, but no, that's not pastoral concern, it's the self-interest of a very profitable manufacturing lobby.

After a horrific event like this, we are repeatedly told "now is not the time to discuss any limitations on guns." When, then, is the time?

I think this is a voice that belongs in our conversation, a highly trained police and military experienced witness analyzing the claim that an armed citizen moviegoer in the theater in Aurora could have killed the killer and saved lives, the argument that we're hearing that on balance many more armed citizens actually could and would save lives and stop violent crimes.

Putting this witness alongside Charles Branas's University of Pennsylvania research quoted above gets me thinking that there's something irrationally religious (idolatrous as the prophets of the Old Testament use the term) in people's devotion to guns and belief that we need them to keep us safe.

Pace Elizabeth Kaeton, articles in the news this week have stressed that most mass shooters are not mentally ill, and it's certainly too soon to label James Holmes as fitting that description. Not every mental aberration rises to the level of mental illness, much less the sort of mental illness that could be used as a defense for murder. We simply don't know why Holmes did this, or to what extent mental illness enters into the situation.

Donald, thanks for that link. Add the fact that the theater was dark and filling with smoke/gas, and you can almost guarantee that the death toll would have been higher if someone had taken advantage of Colorado gun laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons.

I fail to see how talking about gun control now is pastorally insensitive. It is speaking out in the face of the evil that the NRA and guns have on this country; it is saying that we deplore what has happened and that we want to take steps to lessen the possibility of it happening again. It is saying that we value human life more than guns, something our politicians, including our president, don't seem to do. Taking a stand for life seems to me to be very pastorally sensitive.

From today's newsfeed: 5, including 2 kids, killed in NYC crash ...

... A question, seriously, having to perhaps do with logic or "related-ness": Why is the Aurora tragedy so many more orders of magnitude significant than an SUV crash taking 5 lives?

How are handguns or shotguns more dangerous than motor vehicles, which kill 40,000 and injure nearly 3 million each year?

Not coming from an NRA-er. Just confused about the hysteria that accompanies mass shootings vs the generally benign reaction to traffic tragedies.

Or this: At least 11 killed in single truck crash in Texas

Cripes. What's this world coming to?

If there is a political agenda in this exchange it is to discourage a rational discussion about gun violence in the United States. It is a moral imperative to consider the causes of such senseless violence in the hope of reducing its chance of repeating itself. We are unable to help the victims but we can honor them by helping to spare others the same fate.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Pete, just a guess, but I think it has to do with what we think of as reasonable risks. Getting into a car involves the risk that you might be in an accident. Going to the movies ought not to entail the risk that someone armed to the teeth will shoot you and scores of other audience members. It's not really foreseeable.

And, too, when motor vehicle accidents happen they are just that - accidents. There was nothing accidental about the Aurora shooting. It's an evil act in the way that a car accident is not.

All that gets our attention.

One more thing: guns are weapons, articles of violence and destruction (which may be justified, unjustified, or neither depending on the target). They already command a certain amount of concern and fear because of the violence that is part and parcel of their being. A car is usually a tool, a form of transportation. When an object of violence is used against the innocent, especially when used randomly, it stirs public anger in a special way.

Sometimes car wrecks do command the same sort of anger - witness the young woman sent to prison a couple of years ago for intentionally causing a head-on collision in a failed suicide attempt; she survived, but the woman driving the other car and her young son did not

To drive a car you need a license, you can't drive if impaired. For gun there is not even a minimal standards. I am not against owning guns. I have them - but I am against weapons that have no other purpose than killing people and I am sad that the US is a huge exporter of weapons.
Yes there are still accidents and people drive drunk but there is an effort to stop this. There is no effort at all to stop gun violence, teach ways of conflict resolution that don't involve getting out the guns.

Pete, another difference that we haven't yet touched between gun violence and auto deaths (and others, like workplace accidents, etc): in fact auto safety is quite regulated. There was a time when seat belts weren't required equipment, and even once installed it was a long time before laws required that they be worn. There was a time before air bags were installed; and there are still states where one can operate a motorcycle without a helmet. We've been regulating safety on cars and trucks for a long time; and while folks complain when new requirements happen - "It will add weight, and cost fuel economy;" or "it will add to the cost and the consumer won't like it;" or "if I want to take the risk, it's mine to take...." - we've come to accept that there are risks to others that we take into account that justify healthy limits to our actions. A small group with a lot of money and a big voice and an absolutist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment have kept us from taking reasonable actions regarding guns and ammunition that we've been taking with cars and trucks for a long time.

Marshall Scott

One of the headlines in today's Denver Post is that requests for background checks in Colorado to purchase firearms jumped 41% over the weekend. One gun shop reported 15 to 20 people waiting at the door Friday morning to make purchases.

After the Giffords shooting, I was thinking of posting a few weeks after the incident out of respect. I didn't quite get around to it.

However, this is the second mass civilian shooting this year (the Army base shooting excluded).

Additionally, one lawmaker made public comments that an armed bystander could have prevented the massacre. One Slate columnist interviewed a firearms instructor and NRA member who insisted that he could have taken Holmes down.

We have a lot folks dying from gun violence, including suicide, accident, and individual confrontations (justified and not). Even within the law of the land, there are ways to preserve people's access to weapons for hunting and defense, while making it more difficult to kill a number of unarmed civilians. And yet some folks on the pro-gun side are howling. I think a response is warranted.

Mine is here, by the way.

http://weiwentg.blogspot.com/2012/07/i-could-have-stopped-colorado-massacre.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheProgressiveChristianGuideToPublicPolicy+%28The+Progressive+Christian+Guide+to+Public+Policy%29