Even though I'd spent the summer reporting, driving the 90 miles back and forth for interviews, protests and church services, I had not yet covered that difficult ground with my own elementary schoolers.

How did that happen?

I knew they would ask, and for that, I had answers: failed locks, failed police, failed systems.

I was more nervous about whether they would ask "why" it happened. I cannot explain that part.

Schools around Texas, most of which had been back in session for weeks, wore maroon T-shirts on Sept. 6 to show their support as kids in Uvalde went back to campuses fortified with more cameras, higher fences and heavy police presence.

My kids asked about "maroon shirt day," and I knew the day we'd been putting off for months had come.

As I prepared, I thought back to the evening of May 24, as my husband and I looked at our sleeping children, ages 5 and 8. "We're going to have to tell them eventually," I said.

At that point we didn't even know yet the full list of victims in the Uvalde massacre.

On May 25 we dropped them off at their San Antonio elementary school, trusting that if the news came up at school, the teachers and staff had been briefed on how to handle it.

We hadn't wanted the kids to start their school day processing the news — news we ourselves had barely digested.

As they slammed the door shut and bounced away from the car, I cursed the air.

It was the only available force, it seemed, to blame.

Gun violence is in the air Americans breathe, and like air, I knew Texas' response to what happened in Uvalde would be neither solid nor substantial.

I drove into Uvalde a week later as a reporter, as a mother and as a person of wavering faith.

I've given up on theodicy — trying to explain how God could let bad things happen — and instead tried to communicate God's love and justice to a hurting world.

I don't know why bad things happen, but I know it's our job, as people who claim to follow Jesus, to pursue shalom, to try to make things right.

Part of responding to bad things is making sure we prevent them from happening again.

We want to both alleviate pain and prevent it when we can.

On the drive, I would lament the world we've created, the suffering left unaddressed, and wonder how I'd eventually explain it to my children.

Ironically, sitting on my shelf was a preview copy of my book, "Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide for Parents Questioning Their Faith."

I was supposed to be good at these conversations.

White evangelicals' idolatry of guns is exactly the kind of betrayal that led many of the people featured in the book to leave the churches they'd grown up in, deconstruct their faith and question everything they thought they knew about how to raise moral people.

Yet, I am holding onto the possibility of a good God in the midst of hypocrisy, violence and power hunger.

But that book is also about giving our kids love when we don't have answers, when we cannot reconcile our spirit to the God we thought we knew, much less to a church lusting after power.

School shootings put us in that place without answers, and they fill our children with questions.

Mass shootings have brought the problem of evil to our doorstep.

Why would God allow kids to be killed at school?

We all pray for our children's safety … so why do some kids not come home?

Are mass shooters uniquely evil, or do they have a religion of anger and supremacy cheering them on?

While we wrestle with the fruitlessness of such theodicy, we are cut off, often in God's name, from any kind of solace, any kind of reassurance that if not God, then at least our neighbours are doing anything to keep our kids from harm or to comfort those who grieve.

The parents who lost children and the children who lost parents on May 24 are begging for gun reform; they are demanding responses from lawmakers — we've heard it directly from their mouths over and over.

Those who oppose them, politicians mostly, are the same who are quick to quote Scripture, court big-name pastors and tout a brand of Christianity that baptizes their various agendas.

That was weighing on my mind as I prepared for the conversation with my kids, but as the actual conversation unfolded, they were not struggling to reconcile anything.

My kids were quick to reassure themselves that their safety plan was in place.

They asked practical questions about locks and procedures, trying to figure out what went wrong at Robb Elementary. And then, after assessing the situation, they talked about how sad they were for the kids and their families, tears welling and receding.

The lockdown generation knows school shootings are possible, and young men bursting into schools to shoot indiscriminately is just something that happens sometimes.

They know how to hide quietly in closets and desks.

Their doors stay locked; their windows stay covered.

In some ways, they've never known a world without that looming presence.

But to hear that it can all fail, and fail so spectacularly, is as jarring for them as it is for me, and there's real compassion for the slain.

While they are aghast at the malfunctioning of a fortress because that is what their schools have become, I am aghast at the dysfunction of a nation.

My kids never asked why, at least not in the grand sense.

They weren't in disbelief or existential crisis over their loss of innocence.

If the lockdown generation is going to believe in God, it will always be a God who coexists with both the gunman and the ones who put the gun in his hands.

Prayer, for them, will carry the stench of inaction — both parents' prayers unanswered and the "thoughts and prayers" of nonresponsive politicians.

It's difficult to know what hope looks like in this scenario and what goodness and shalom might mean, but I am determined to figure out what it means to be the people of God when it feels like God is gone and all we have left is air.

• Bekah McNeel is an author at Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Despite significant progress in banning some kinds of firearms and confiscating others, New Zealand still has no gun registry.

"We might be east of Australia geographically but we continue to be the Wild West when it comes to gun control," said Peter Garrick, the executive secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Diocese of Auckland.

"We have more than twice as many legally imported but unregistered guns as we have registered dogs. "We continue to import them on an industrial scale - 52,000 in 2018 alone - and allow them to be marketed aggressively, particularly in rural towns."

Garrick is accusing the government of dragging its feet over the matter as a gun register would not now be active until June 2023.

Making an oral submission to the Justice Select Committee on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, Garrick said New Zealand had twice as many guns per capita in circulation as Australia and more than five times that of the UK.

He told the Committee one of the reasons for this "dangerous situation in which we live is the lack of controls over the importation and commercial sale of guns." He also pointed to a legal loophole in the current legislation which lets purchasers on-sell their weapons without breaking the law.

He cited research by Professor Alexander Gillespie who showed - three years ago - how accountability, traceability and safety would be improved by introducing a comprehensive gun register - an essential next step following the Christchurch shootings.

Garrick said the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill may be well-intentioned but lacked credibility as a tool for solving the increasing use of firearms in violent situations.

He said the Commission wanted the Arms Act amended so that gun licences were issued only to people with a ‘genuine reason' to possess a firearm and that these be renewed every five years. He also wanted all licensed firearms owners to register their firearms within a year of the gun register going ‘live.'

There is also a strong argument for licensed firearms owners to be allowed to purchase only ammunition that is suitable for their registered firearms and that ammunition sales be recorded on the firearms registry.

Source

• Supplied - Justice and Peace Commission

Germany, for instance, went through a string of devastating attacks between 2002 and 2009.

Between 1996 and 2008, major school shootings also occurred in Finland and Scotland, among other places.

But in Europe, there hasn't been a major high-casualty gun attack on a campus in almost a decade.

Meanwhile, Wednesday's shooting in Florida was at least the sixth of its kind in the United States this year — 45 days into 2018.

There is widespread consensus in Europe and abroad that some school shootings are impossible to prevent, but the numbers still speak a clear language: There are some things countries can do, and Europe appears to have learned from uncomfortable lessons.

The most frequently cited reason for why mass shootings — not necessarily in schools — are more frequent in some countries than in others is the prevalence of handguns.

In his famous study, "Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries," University of Alabama criminology professor Adam Lankford found a link between the number of guns and mass shootings that killed four or more people.

The data set ranged from 1966 through 2012.

The study indicated that a decrease in the number of weapons also would probably result in a decrease in shootings.

That's exactly what happened in Australia after the country tightened gun legislation following a mass shooting in 1996.

It would also explain why countries where gun ownership is rare, such as France or Britain, have largely been spared such catastrophic incidents.

Apart from arguing that Lankford's overall data set is misleading because it doesn't take into account politically motivated violence, critics also questioned whether the number of weapons is really the most significant factor.

They point to one nation in particular: Switzerland.

Switzerland has one of the world's highest ratios of firearms per person, with an estimated 45.7 guns per 100 residents, according to the Small Arms Survey.

Only two countries have a higher ratio: Yemen, with 54.8 guns per 100 residents, and the United States, with 88.8 guns per 100 residents.

Other studies have even indicated the share of households with weapons may almost be the same in Switzerland as it is in the United States.

Those statistics have big margins of error, but they still point to a legitimate question: Why has there never been a school shooting in Switzerland, despite the Swiss enthusiasm for weapons? Continue reading

• Image: Huffington Post
• Note: In the USA 18 year olds can buy an AR15, but not buy a beer.

The Church Protection Act passed the Senate with a 28-4 vote and the House of Representatives with an even more decisive 85-8 vote.

The Catholic Diocese of Little Rock joined the local bishop of the Episcopal Church in opposing the measure.

Gun control has become an increasingly contentious issue in the United States since the schoolhouse massacre of 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, in December.

The Arkansas law says "personal security is increasingly important" and "this act is immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health, and safety".

Among the opponents of the bill, Democrat Senator Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock said she was "trying to wrap my head around how we get Jesus Christ being non-violent and churches as a house of prayer".

The bill was sponsored by Republican Senator Bryan King from Green Forest, a rural town in northern Arkansas. In an interview with CNN, he called churches "soft targets" that deserved to be able to protect themselves.

In particular, King said, the law was important for rural communities, where "it could be thirty minutes to an hour" before police responded to a violent incident in a church.

The new law will allow individual religious leaders to continue a complete ban on firearms, allow a select few to carry firearms, or allow all members of the congregation to carry firearms inside the church, given they have the proper permit.

According to CNN, religious leaders were primarily concerned about any effect the law would have on insurance rates for houses of worship that choose to allow concealed weapons.

When the bill becomes law, Arkansas will join a small number of states that have passed legislation specifically allowing concealed weapons in houses of worship.

While about 20 states allow the practice because of "right to carry" laws, only a few states have singled out houses of worship in legislation.

Sources:

Christian Post

CNN

Image: All Christian News

Nor, apparently, can anyone else. If they could have, then they would have done so already. Some of us are old enough to remember when a madman poisoned packages of Tylenol in 1982. Seven people died, and the reaction was immediate: the entire run of the product was recalled. Packaging was changed so that the buyer would know it's safe and wasn't tampered with. Liberal or conservative had nothing to do with it. It was not treated as a political issue. No one claimed that making it marginally harder to get at those headache pills was the first step toward dictatorship. Read more

Sources

• D L Hughley in Huffington Post
• Image: The Guardian

D L Hughley is an actor and stand-up comedian.

At Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Aurora, Denver, where nearly 1,500 people gathered to remember parishioner A.J. Boik, who was among the 12 people killed in the Batman massacre, Father Mauricio Bermudez said "We live in a culture that promotes violence." He asked, "What kind of people are we becoming?"

"This is our opportunity to change things, to do something different," said Bermudez.

Father James Martin, says responding to the Aurora Batman massacre by calling on God for help and comfort is not enough: "Simply praying, 'God, never let this happen again' is insufficient for the person who believes that God gave us the intelligence to bring about lasting change," he said.

Martin's opinion piece created an avalanche of comment on Facebook and Twitter. Within hours of posting his opinion he had to shut down comments on his Facebook page and cut off trading tweets on the topic.

Martin says just praying is not enough. He thinks gun control is as much a pro-life issue as is abortion, euthanasia or the death penalty "and programs that provide the poor with the same access to basic human needs as the wealthy."

There is a "consistent ethic of life" that views all these issues as linked, because they are," he says.

Martin believes that pro-life religious people need to consider how it might be made more difficult for people to procure weapons that are not designed for sport or hunting or self-defense. "If one protests against abortion clinics because they facilitate the taking of human life, why not protest against largely unregulated suppliers of firearms because they facilitate the taking of human life as well?"

In Rome on Sunday, Pope Benedict expressed dismay and sadness at the shooting.

"I was deeply shocked by the senseless violence which took place in Aurora, Denver," he said in his regular Sunday Angelus address.

Source

• America Magazine
• Toronto Sun
• USA Today
• USA Today
• TVNZ
• Los Angeles Times
• Image: Los Angeles Times