To the Editor:

Martin urged prayers for the Minneapolis children and others killed and injured in church by a gunman last Wednesday, Trump lowered the flags to half-mast, and others on both sides of the aisle urged thoughts and prayers for the victims and the community. What do we call repeating, over and over, the same “remedy,” hoping for a different outcome, when it never works?

How many school-shootings have we had over the last 20 years, after which we thought and prayed?
These are self-inflicted assaults on our children which this country refuses to recognize and confront. The assailant had a rifle, shotgun, and pistol. The two fatalities were 8 and 10 years old. You talk about “saving the precious babies,” Martin, yet you have said that guns are just a “part of life.” In your mind, at what age do living children stop being “precious” and worthy of “saving”? You advocate for the unborn, but as against gun rights, your passion dissipates for little kids.

From ancient times, prayer and sacrifice have consoled and reassured people who invoked their gods for relief and better outcomes. It’s often a comfort to parents, relatives, and those left behind, for prayers for acceptance and strength to go on. If prayer is effective in consoling human pain, if it assuages fear or despair, if it brings spiritual peace, it is doing its job. Do we think God is looking for human direction to decide what to do next, to interfere or not, or to intervene on behalf of one person and not another? How do you explain the Jewish, Armenian, Gazan, and Rwandan holocausts? Those events were either God’s Will or they represent our corrupt exercise of Free Will. Humans were given intelligence and are designed to figure out how to solve our problems. We are making this God’s problem and not our own.

Some Americans, often Republicans, have decided it’s acceptable to trade their Wild West gun rights for the fact that America is the only country on the planet where the leading cause of death and injury to “our precious children”, is bullets. The Republican answer is police in schools or arming teachers, which doubles as early-education for children, parents, and the populace, in accepting gun-based authority in our daily lives (which has already begun). The Second Amendment of the Constitution mentions firearms, but the Founding Fathers had never experienced technology like our modern weapons. Yet, the Trump SCOTUS finds this one exception to their “Originalist” doctrine, so that Americans have access to deadly force on our streets and in our schools, for use at whatever provocation. “Thoughts and prayers” will not solve this.

Reagan’s endorsement of the NRA gun lobby, repeal of reasonable restrictions on waiting periods for gun ownership and use, his endorsement of firearms as symbols of “freedom,” (NRA’s Heston, “from my cold, dead hands”) unfettered a flood of guns into American society in an explosion of gun violence, often on the most innocent among us.

Thoughts and prayers for the slaughter of innocents are performative, and perhaps consoling, but clearly have changed nothing. Action and legislation, the innate American response to threat and injustice is required. But we continue, as if school-shootings are an Act of God.

Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, CA