Last night, I attended a local vigil and call to action following last week’s terrible slaughter at a high school in Florida. These lines formed part of my remarks.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus asks the crowd, “Who among you, if your child asks for a fish, would give him a snake instead, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?”
We act sometimes as though,
when Jesus told the thief on the cross,
Today, you will be with me in paradise,
that it made up for the casings outside
the Paradise Club, and the holes in the walls;
the excruciating pain of metal through flesh
as the hammer falls.
As though, when Jesus said,
Let the little children come to me – but no.
Let’s not go
there.
As though, when he saw the funeral bier,
Jesus was not gripped in his guts by the waste of life,
not assaulted by the mother’s shrill grief,
as though he were able to pass by
on the other side,
as though death had no sting.
We act sometimes as though
Jesus will rewind each death we do not want
or didn’t mean, as though
he himself were not laid out on that board
unable to move three days now since
we shot him coming out of church.
Repent! the echoes ricochet off the bible.
I will require a reckoning for your lifeblood,
says the Lord.
Repent! the echoes ricochet off the gospel,
for you cannot serve both God and guns,
and who among you, when a child begs for bread,
would hand her a bullet instead?
The Revd Rosalind C Hughes is the Rector of the Church of the Epiphany in Euclid, Ohio





The problem is the Second Amendment that provides cover for the NRA at every turn. All the other “efforts” are treating the symptoms not the disease. The only thing that all the other countries with reasonable gun laws don’t have is our Second Amendment. Repeal it and we might make some headway.
People take lives, might use guns, or knives, or cars or bombs, but its still people that are the problem. Enforce the 1000+ current control laws.
You seem to be following the “there is evil out there and it will manifest itself some way” theory. But that ignores the gap in lethality between a semi-automatic gun and even a car. Of course a bad person will find a way to hurt others, but the guy in Las Vegas, for instance could never have done such savagery with a knife or baseball bat.
Lexiann Grant – most of the gun control laws have been rescinded. It is an open market with no checks in Florida and many other places. One example: http://fortune.com/2018/02/15/trump-shooting-mental-illness/