I am writing this post very early in the morning of Friday, Sept. 6. It is less than 48 hours after 14-year-old Colt Gray decided to start his freshman year at Apalachee High School, 40 minutes north of me, by murdering his classmates and teachers, four of whom are dead, nine of whom are injured.
I begin with a confession. When I first hear of a school shooting, my initial instinct is to try not to process it very deeply. I try not to think about it. I try not to watch the news coverage or read the latest news stories.
David Gushee
I am not at all proud of this, but I can see that it is what I often do. The reason is that it hurts too damn much. I don’t wantto dive deeply into this new horror, this new murder of children and teachers, this new shattering of families and communities, this senseless evil on top of other senseless evils.
I say this as someone who spent three full years writing a dissertation about the Holocaust. While my children were very little, I was working all day at my paid job and then reading and writing at night about the often imaginatively sadistic Nazi murder of 1.5 million children — and those who tried and mainly failed to save those children. In today’s terms, I realize I have murder-of-children PTSD.
But it is more than that. A generation later, I am a grandfather. My oldest child was a public school teacher for almost 15 years. We have three beloved little ones who go off to preschool and grade school each day. Every time I hear of a school shooting, I deeply, deeply fear for my grandchildren.
“I hate that I live in a country where that tremble of fear is perfectly rational.”
I hate that tremble of fear. I hate that I live in a country where that tremble of fear is perfectly rational — for grandparents and parents, for teachers and school staff and, most of all, for the children themselves. Our beloved children — who must go to school in fear, who must do shooter drills the way their grandparents did nuclear bomb drills, who every so often find themselves watching their classmates and teachers being shot to death during third period.
I report on this very early morning of Sept. 6 that, once again, my efforts not to process the latest school shooting have failed. The processing of horror always comes to me anyway. It usually comes at night, when I am trying to sleep. I am old now. I so very much need my sleep. But last night I was instead haunted by thoughts like these:
What kind of narrative was young Colt Gray imagining that he was living in? What kind of story would lead him to decide that the best next plot point for his life was to murder his schoolmates?
Where do these school shooters get these sick narratives? Certainly there are now plenty of school shootings to copycat. But what kind of cesspool spaces online help nurture murderous fantasies? What kind of people think that creating and occupying those spaces is a good use of their time?
What was happening with Colt Gray’s father? How could his failures have been so acute that he is also now charged with very serious crimes associated with his son’s murder of teachers and classmates?
How does a 14-year-old get access to a weapon of war and manage to leave home with it to go to school? From the home side, how is that even possible? Were loaded assault weapons just lying around unsecured? Was no one paying attention to what this child took to school?
“Why are we sacrificing our children to the idolatry of guns, every year?”
I can’t get into a baseball game without going through a metal detector. After all these school shootings over many years, surely this school had metal detectors; we read that it had a brand-new alert system that proved essential in the event. If so, how do you slip an AR-15 past that system and into a school building?
Why can’t a country and its leaders that can do a number of other hard things well never, ever solve this gun violence crisis? Why are we sacrificing our children to the idolatry of guns, every year?
But the worst, most haunting questions are the ones that emerge out of my fear and my empathy. Questions like:
How does a parent ever recover from sending a child off to the school bus in the morning and receiving them back in a casket that night?
How do children who have witnessed the murder of their friends ever recover from what they have seen?
To those candidates running for office this year, I say this: People will truly begin to believe in our democracy and have hope in our future when our politicians actually begin to solve the greatest problems that afflict us. One of these is gun violence, especially when it takes the lives of our children.
Solve this. Solve this. Solve this. Now.
David P. Gushee is a leading Christian ethicist. serves as distinguished university professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair of Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is a past president of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics. His latest book is Introducing Christian Ethics. He’s also the author of Kingdom Ethics, After Evangelicalism, and Changing Our Mind: The Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians. He and his wife, Jeanie, live in Atlanta. Learn more: davidpgushee.com or Facebook.
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