All of our hearts bled green on February 13th, 2023 as we watched in horror as an active shooter was reported on the MSU campus. When the terror ended, MSU became another grim statistic to add to the list of the worst 25 shootings in our nation’s history. The numbers of 3 dead and 5 wounded cannot contain the extent of the grief, heartbreak and fear that are now part of the college experience for so many MSU families.
But the shooting at MSU is notable for another reason. For several of the students at MSU; this was not their first experience of a school shooting. Emma Riddle had come to MSU after surviving the shooting at Oxford High School in 2021. The same was true of her MSU classmates, Ferguson and Mancini. In the same way, Jackie Matthews was in 6th grade when she survived the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut. Jackie is now a senior at MSU. All of the trauma of the Sandy Hook massacre came flooding back to her mind as the notice of an active shooter on her MSU campus appeared on her phone.
–When we have students who have personally experienced two mass school shootings, that is when we can know for certain that gun violence is no longer just a rare or isolated incident. It is not just something that happens somewhere else, “over there”. It happens here. It happens to us. It is an epidemic of violence that is a recurring nightmare that is traumatizing our whole country. As followers of Jesus, we cannot and should not be silent about this.
Jesus, the Prince of Peace, did not own a sword and did not advocate their use. In Matthew 26:50-54 Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword after Peter acts in self-defense of the group. Jesus summarizes the final outcome for all who use the tools of violence by saying, “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” We could expand that wisdom to our own context now: All who draw a gun will die by a gun.
We as a country are not safer because we have more guns available. In fact, it is just the opposite. With more people owning guns, there are more opportunities for hurting and broken people to obtain a gun, either legally or illegally. With more guns around, there are more public shootings and many more gun suicides. As a nation we need to get serious about our neighbors need for better care for their mental health. We need more regulation and training for gun owners. We need to require that guns are registered, locked and secured and reported missing when they are stolen. If we treat handling a gun with as much regulation as we do driving a car, we as a nation would be on a much better path to decreasing the number of deaths due to gunshots each year.
Jesus did not own a sword, and I believe that he also would not have owned a gun. As followers of Christ, we need to ask ourselves, why should we?
Article in Rockford Squire Newspaper 2/23/2023
