We are in the last week of Lent and a comment recently added to my last blog (Thanks Kathy) has prodded me to write again.
There are things in life that continue to amaze me. How did I so quickly get to be the senior generation? How is it that the hair on my legs is now sparse and the hairs on my chin are ample? How can it be that the children of the next generation, by the standard of centuries past, would be well into their child-bearing years? While working down in the southern Ontario area I am living in an old house – why are there so many flies buzzing in the windows these warming spring days? Where do they come from? How does a brown dried bulb grow into a beautiful Easter lily? But mostly I wonder how a 28 year old woman could walk into a school filled with young children and shoot them?
According to the articles I have read there is some question as to what makes a “mass shooting” but according to ‘The Gun Violence Archive’, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence using police reports, news coverage and other public sources, they define a mass shooting as one in which at least four people were killed or injured. By that standard they have counted 130 in the United States so far this year. 130 mass shootings. Read that number again – 130 and it is only the end of March. I find that number to be astonishing and almost beyond comprehension. I am dismayed. Shocked. Stunned. Sickened.
Last year the group counted 647 mass shootings in the USA and of those, 21 involved five or more fatalities.
The incident in Nashville yesterday was perpetrated by a heavily armed former student. She walked into this Christian elementary school and shot and killed three children and three adults before she was shot and killed by the police. I am left wondering the two extremes – how can a person who is clearly mentally ill legally (according to the reports) purchase high powered assault weapons? How can a society allow these tragedies to persist?
This week we draw near to Holy Week, to Good Friday when we embrace the sorrow and tragedy of the crucifixion. A tragic killing that changed the course of history because, through that killing, through Jesus being hung on a cross, the grace and mercy and love of God was revealed. I wonder what is being revealed in this latest mass shooting in Nashville? A society that won’t, can’t, stop their fascination with guns? A society that allows gun violence as it prizes individual rights despite the tremendous cost to human life? I am not pointing a finger only at the USA. Canada cannot point fingers. Though our record is not as tragic we are not without a record of shame. What does it take to stop such random and devastating action?
I don’t have any answers to these questions. I am left shaking my head and heavy with sorrow. How do these tragedies impact you? Can you offer me any wisdom? I would love to read your comments.
We like to make sense of things, asign order where is none. In this case one can’t comprehend without knowing more, more details, more background and yet who wants to delve into the sordid? You are so right to consider not pointing fingers, and I think too it is helpful to be humble before God, and ourselves, and not doubt the depths of our own sin without comparing ourselves to others.
Perhaps there is wonderful mystery and along side there is terrible mystery and we need to choose which we want to live with.