It is inarguable that our children (and their teachers, let’s not forget, and aides, and caretakers, and all) are supremely valuable. It is also, unfortunately, inarguable that we find them living, moving, and having their being under the threat of gun violence. Firearms have infamously become the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in America, even as security measures have multiplied along with the guns and the deaths, the injuries and the assaults on the body and soul of families across the country.

The individual who has designed the Rapid Access Safe Room System, who also manufactures easy-up hunting blinds as well as emergency housing shelters, knows that new fortresses are not a solution. Thomas told The Washington Post, “This is a way to buy time until we as a community and a country figure out the bigger, deeper-rooted problems. I hope this thing has to go out of business because we fixed it.”

Yet here it is, launched with legislators and the national press at hand, announcing its ease of use and added peace of mind at $50-60,000 each for a classroom-sized shelter. Although a fraction of the economic activity surrounding the guns themselves, initiatives and products to “harden” schools are a growing business, with spending on security systems for schools already exceeding $3 billion. There is certainly money to be made in marketing security solutions to a safety problem we refuse to address at its roots: roots in rage, violence, even despair, and ease of access to the firepower to turn them into carnage.

After a quick tally of the number of classrooms in any given school, let alone school district, it is easy, if cynical, to wonder whom these panic rooms will protect; whether they will remain within reach only of districts that can afford to accommodate their fear, rather than stuffing it down with their cheap morning coffee and hoping that it stays buried.

“I don’t control things at the lawmaking and legislative levels,” Thomas is quoted as saying in The Washington Post story. “So I was like, ‘Well, what can I do?’ Yet he did meet with lawmakers and community leaders to move the panic room pilot project into schools.

“We can’t depend on the government,” the inventor of the shelters told The Washington Post.

On the other hand, he told AL.com that, “We want to get this implemented legislatively. Ultimately, the goal is to have these be just like fire suppression systems.” That is, encoded into our national life, just as gun violence is becoming engraved upon our daily awareness.

I admit, I am aggrieved that we are in a place where these panic rooms seem like a decent idea, or at least a good story, for those who can afford them, and those who can afford to maintain them, and those who can afford to make space for them, in their classrooms, in their minds, in the pits of their stomachs.

I think that Thomas’ question, “Well, what can I do?” is the right one.

And I think that with a little ingenuity, a little legislative leverage, a lot less profit, and a more prophetic vision, we can do better than to spread panic rooms among our children’s schools.

There is a place for steel bolts and cameras. There is a place for the contemplation of danger and the assessment of harm, the strategic memorization of exits and the hermeneutic of slight suspicion masked by a welcoming smile, an outstretched hand; would that there were fewer places for these things.

But there are other ways to pursue security that do not drive us apart, set us apart, set up barriers between us and the others made in the same image. When God split the adam, flesh from flesh and bone from bone (see Genesis 2:18-23), it was not to divide them but to create companionship, desire, comfort, turning humanity into what Wilda C. Gafney in Womanist Midrash calls “a bifurcated being (1).” 

If we were to pursue that which did not separate but brought us back together, what might that look like?

LISTEN to Walk With Me by Common Hymnal 

This is not a call to those who are busy defending themselves from direct action, nursing new wounds, or shell-shocked. It is the call and responsibility of those of us who are otherwise safe, with our feet by the fire, worried by the violence of others, and saddened by the sorrow of our friends. Our solidarity is not in pretending that our risk is the same but in changing the factors that destabilize the field.

What if we were to attack instead of retreat? What if, in place of despair or even a secure defense, we were to perpetrate an all-out offensive on the things that threaten to divide us: antisemitism, racism, domestic (what a word) violence, the prevalence, and ease of acquisition of guns, America’s preferred instrument of destruction?

From red flag laws to the red hot fire of forges melting down guns for garden tools, there are ways of making ourselves more secure that do not demand our separation but our cooperation. There are ways of reconciling ourselves to a human nature full of faults and fault-lines that require the filling in of trenches, the digging out of land mines, making straight the paths and passages between us (see Isaiah 40:3-5). 

Fund a violence interruption program; find out from the local trauma center who is doing the work you want to support. Mount a letter-writing campaign; find out from local and state anti-violence chapters what kind of legislation is being considered that will make our communities more or less safe from gun violence and other types of harm. Attend anti-racist and abolitionist educational opportunities. Bring some home to roost. 

What if we were to do the work of peace instead of the work of privilege, the building of towers of ivory and arrow-slits?

There are ways of loving our neighbors that do not require us to arm ourselves against one another, but that require us to equip ourselves with subversive understanding, deep collaboration, a conspiracy that recognizes the secret image of God settled subtly into every human being.

What if we were to combat the cold by setting fire to the things that chill us instead of shivering in dismay?

1 – Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 21

It turns out that the numbers were not as fresh as the news. Because of the delays involved in collecting and analyzing data, the gruesome record reported last month was reached in 2019. That means that it does not include data from 2020, during which a record number of guns were purchased, many by first-time gun owners.

The 2019 numbers did include the local death of a six-year-old who was sleeping on the couch in her family home when a drive-by shooting killed her in October 2019 in my city. But they do not include the 15-year-old shot and killed a couple of weeks before Christmas as he left a community meeting about the deadly police shooting of 19-year-old Arthur Keith in November 2020. Nor do they reflect the loss of the five-year-old boy who died last month of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The numbers, as horrifying as they are, do not include any of the exponentially larger number of children injured or traumatized by gun violence nationally, a tragedy recounted by John Woodrow Cox in Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.

Certainly, we are in crisis if gun violence now presents the highest risk of death for children whom we have pledged to raise in peace, who should never have to see a gun. The numbers can be numbing. As they continue mount, they may appear insurmountable.

But there are things that we can do in our own congregations to dial back the danger.

Of course, repenting of our violent ways, teaching and preaching the gospel of peace that shuns weapons and wields healing hands instead of firearms is a good, perhaps the best, place to start. Of course, we know, too, that not everyone will agree to give up their guns to be beaten into garden tools.

As I mention in Whom Shall We Fear? Urgent Questions for Christians in an Age of Violence, as we return to Sunday School or youth programming, we have an opportunity — whether it takes place in person or online — to inform and educate families as we ask for their information to register their young people. Advice about the risks of keeping guns in the home and education about the safe storage of guns, if a family really must keep one, could save young children from accidental triggers, adolescents from access to the most deadly means of suicide, and keep guns out of the hands of others who simply should not have them because of the harm and havoc they can sow.

Several years ago, a fellow parent was concerned about a turning-teenaged child who was getting into trouble at home and online. “They know how to get into everything,” their parent despaired.

I sympathized, but I also worried: “You’ve told me before that you keep a gun at home, and now you’ve told me that your child knows how to get into everything. What are you doing to keep them from getting that gun?,” I asked point-blank.

We can do no less — including our churches and Sunday Schools.

The headline is heartbreaking and troubling. But,

The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:17, Book of Common Prayer)

As a clergyperson in America, a citizen of less than a decade’s standing, in many ways still a stranger in a strange land, I have noticed something else in the language that I am hearing and seeing and being invited to subscribe to through email chains and online resources.

I keep being invited to find common ground, middle ground, to eschew the extremes and split the difference between polar opposites by resisting the draw of each. I am also invited to resist that pull toward the middle ground, to stand firm on my mark on the political spectrum, believing (as each of us must) that it represents our best chance of achieving justice, mercy, and the will of God.

But what if our political landscape, even in its Platonic ideal form, is not the perfect overlay for the terrain of the kingdom of God?

The problem of idolatry is insidious. I am concerned that, for all our brave talk of the Gospel, there is a part of us that is still tempted to find our own way toward the knowledge of good and evil, knowing better than God what is good for us (see Genesis 3). That there is a prideful instinct within us that assumes that we can, perhaps even have, designed the political system and philosophy that will lead us into the promised land of peace, prosperity, justice, and rest. If only we could all agree to meet there, on common ground.

READ: The Priority of Peaceableness in a Disruptive Election

The problem is that only God is perfect. The grammar of the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union,” belies itself; perfection is not possible for anyone but God. Even Jesus, when addressed as, “Good teacher,” replied that God alone is good (Mark 10:17-18). The grammar of the document over which we tear ourselves to pieces and hope to put ourselves back together recognizes by its very construction, by relativizing perfection, that it aspires to something that we are not altogether in a position to provide. However perfectly we live into the ideals we have set before us as a nation, America is not the kingdom of God.

None of this means that we do not do our best to engage with the political systems at our disposal (nor that some systems are more helpful than others). They are the tools that provide us input into the steering system of the culture, the ethos, and the economy of this country and the world. It is part of the stewardship enjoined upon us in Genesis to wield the power that we have. It is an opportunity to resist evil, to interpret the struggle to live as God intended us, to bring good news to the poor and release to the captives, on a good day.

The problem of idolatry is that it tempts us to see the means as the end. In saying so, I am not calling anyone who has sent me those emails or signed me up to those Facebook groups or even preached me those sermons an idolater: God forbid. People in glass houses should not throw stones, and I am as fragile in my faith and orthodoxy as the next heretic. I am also committed to non-violence.

I do think that we are each vulnerable to that temptation to rest on solid ground, on something we know and can grasp (or view behind glass at the Library of Congress), as though it were the Rock of our salvation, the Cornerstone of our being.

Finding common ground amid the rubble of our political devastation is an endeavor worth pursuing, but it is not reconciliation, nor is turning our back on the arguments that divide us repentance. Reconciliation will not happen while anyone’s human dignity is denied, and repentance is more creative than repairing the machine that got us here.

Redemption will not be found in the ballot box. May we pray not to find perdition there, either. But hope demands that we set our sights higher than that, even as, in the meantime, we do what we may to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly toward our God.

This piece first appeared at rosalindhughes.com.

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:18, after Jeremiah 31:15)

I do not know why he killed them, although some are beginning to guess. The online white supremacist language, the discovery of which has come to be expected in the aftermath of such an atrocity, has not, to my knowledge, been verified as belonging to the killer at the time of writing. But other clues are emerging. 

In a chilling insight, the Los Angeles Times reported him telling someone, in the chaos of the moment, “I’m really angry.”

In the lead up of President Obama’s second election in 2012, reporters Rosalind S. Helderman and Jon Cohen, writing for the Washington Post, quoted Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who worried, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Hindsight has only clarified the cynical tragedy of such an attitude. 

In White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson, I found the Graham quote draws the thread from the long history of slavery in the United States through the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and up to the last election — a thread quivering with white anger at the suggestion of the establishment of racial equality in America.

When Jeremiah spoke of Rachel weeping, it was to offer comfort: a vision of peace and restoration after the invasion of a foreign force. By the time Matthew quoted him, the picture of harm was from within. It was the people’s own king and his interests that murdered the innocents in Bethlehem. A king, who perceived a threat to his power and influence in the wail of a swaddled infant of his own house, wreaked havoc and let loose his instruments of death. No wonder Rachel refused consolation.

There is a civil war raging in the soul of America, and its violence is not constrained to the Twitter feeds of trolls. From family separation at our borders to the devastation of families by gun violence, the anger against those defined as “others” stems from a similar source. Instead of shouting insurrection on street corners, some angry men spray it across crowds, spreading harm far beyond the death toll. 

Guns are not the only way to kill people, but they were designed and refined to be thoroughly efficient at it. They should not be a normal, everyday, easy accessory in a civilized society that claims to promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It should not be normal, everyday, easy for a teenager to buy a weapon of family-sized destruction. They should not be permitted to promote the deadly agenda of white supremacy and fragile anger.

And Herod still has blood on his hands.