News
and Opinion
The following is
a statement by Forrest Church at All Souls Church at a Worship Service
sponsored by All Souls and New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.
April
23, 1999
Can you imagine
a more perfect time to slaughter your classmates than Adolph Hitler's
birthday? Just think of how many people are not responsible.
These children's
parents were not responsible. They are nice people. Liberal minded people.
Good neighbors. One has worked with disadvantaged children. They couldn't
imagine that their boys could be killers. They didn't know what was
going on.
The NRA certainly
will not admit responsibility. How many times have they told you? Only
people kill people, not guns.
As for us, we certainly
are not responsible. Or so we tell ourselves.
So someone else
must be responsible. I have my own list. Check it with yours. Nasty
movie makers; the producers of violent video games; shock television
and radio instigators of social deviance who unleash pent-up frustrations.
These are just a few of the influences that bombard our most socially
alienated children with incentives to kill their classmates. And how
about guns? Yes, there are as many guns as there are people in this
country, but what if we don't own a gun?
The truth is, unless
we peddle guns wantonly, a bullet in someone's head or heart is no more
our fault than was Hitler's holocaust the fault of all those who together
might have done something but chose to look the other way.
For fifty years,
I have often looked the other way. After all, my life has nothing to
do with guns. For me guns have been a cocktail party subject. I only
shot a gun twice, at skeet. I missed both times and quit. Whenever the
subject came up in a cocktail party, I have been eloquent in my advocacy
of gun control.
Mind you, I never
sent a single dollar to a handgun control group, or any anti-gun group.
But why should I? I was someone who had nothing to do with guns. How
could I have anything to do with gun caused murder?
I even argued about
guns with my father, Frank Church. As a United States Senator from Idaho,
he said that what people did with guns in New York City had nothing
to do with what people did with guns in his home state. We used our
guns to kill people, they used their guns to kill animals.
Since I couldn't
argue with my remarkably liberal father on foreign policy or conservation,
I argued with him about guns. As we often do when we debate our parents
late into the night, I went home feeling morally superior. But the following
morning I did little to prove this. Unless such things as justice and
truth become incarnate in action they lead only to self-righteousness,
and thus diminish our souls.
As of today no
one can argue that gun related violence is localized in our major cities.
Militia gunslingers in Idaho and Texas, teenage Nazi fanciers in Arkansas,
Mississippi and now Colorado prove beyond any doubt that the gun problem
in America is a national problem demanding a federal solution.
Only one good thing
can come from the tragedy in Littleton. A nation of outraged parents
and frightened children must rise as one to break the NRA sponsored
Washington gridlock.
There is no overnight
fix to the problems in society that feed teenage alienation and violence.
But we can do one thing right now that will diminish their potential
impact. We can and must enact strong and meaningful legislation to address
the ready access to firearms. It is true that people kill people, but,
when people decide to kill people, people with guns create far more
carnage than do people with clubs or knives.
My hope today is
this. Knowing what we do, my hope is that every law-abiding person in
this country will feel like a conscience-ridden German might have felt
a little more than half a century ago.
But we must go
one step further, and answer the question "What can I do about
what is happening around me?" in something other than a rhetorical
manner. We must throw off the veil of sophisticated resignation and
remind ourselves that we are each responsible for all our children and
for all our neighbors. Alone, we may be able to do little, but if together
we cannot find a way to become one another's keepers, individually we
shall remain silent accomplices to the tide of wanton violence welling
around us.
Today, those of
us who favor strong national gun control legislation no longer lack
the numbers or the power to enact such legislation. Neither do we lack
practicable and fair answers: trigger locks; recognition systems that
identify the gun user as its owner; and real accountability for firearm-manufacturers
whose guns routinely find their way to crime scenes.
So we lack neither
the numbers nor the answers. All we lack is sufficient will to overcome
the lobbying power of a minority of American citizens, the vocal minority
that opposes federal gun control, with a zeal and energy equal to their
own.
This week we are
weeping together. We are one in our tears. Next week, we must make good
on our tears. We must join together and act to end the national shame
of policies that coddle gun owners while placing our children and ourselves
in mortal jeopardy.
© Forrest Church 1999
