In high school in New York City all those years ago, the Jesuits taught me that I should pray as if everything depended on God but act as if everything depended on me.
Republicans and conservatives have turned that advice on its head.
They now pray as if everything depends upon God but act as if nothing depends upon them.
And today, fourteen high school kids and three adults are dead in Florida as a consequence.
There are many places to go on the gun control debate in this country. The Congress and the Courts are two of the obvious ones, and over the course of my lifetime, they have been well plowed. The results, however, have been dismal. You can pretty much draw a straight line between the rise of pro-gun Second Amendment decisions by the Courts, pro-gun legislation from the Congress and the states, and America's tragic (and unique) rise in -- in fact, acceleration of -- gun violence and what are now clinically referred to as "mass shootings."
The litany is numbing -- Sutherland Springs, Texas, 26 dead and 20 wounded; Las Vegas, 50 dead, 500 wounded; Orlando, 50 dead, 53 wounded; Emmanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC, 9 dead; Sandy Hook, 27 dead; Virginia Tech, 33 dead; Columbine, 15 dead.
And yesterday in Parkland, Florida -- 17 dead and the number is likely to rise.
These mass shootings have many common features. All of them involved the use of semi-automatic weapons, most with large clip gun magazines, that allowed the shooters to kill multiple victims in seconds. Six of the eight occurred after the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, held that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to bear arms regardless of that Amendment's clear text making the right subservient to the need for a well-regulated state militia. All but one occurred after the federal ban on assault weapons was allowed to expire by a Republican Congress in 2004.
And, in all of the cases, politicians in hock to the NRA reacted by calling for . . .
Prayer.
Yesterday was typical.
President Trump offered "prayers and condolences" in a tweet in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that yesterday was "a day you pray never comes." The state's governor, Rick Scott, called for "thoughts and prayers" as the news of the shooting emerged. Colorado's Republican Sen. Cory Gardner was "praying for first responders" as the tragedy unfolded, and Ohio's Rob Portman sent "prayers to the school, the community and the victims of this tragedy." Louisiana's Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy was "praying for the students, teachers and first responders affected by the tragic shooting in Florida." And North Carolina's Thom Tillis offered "thoughts and prayers," as did a host of other Congress people, as well as the chair of the Republican National Committee.
Prayer, of course, is a perfectly appropriate response to tragedy. It reflects our inability to comprehend the incomprehensible. In this case, it reflects our inability to get our heads around the fact that a human being was moved to eliminate children in a senseless act of violence. Ultimately, it is a cri de coeur, searching for meaning within meaninglessness, recognizing that we may never know.
So we ask God.
And that is fine.
Unless it is not . . .
Which is the case when your only reaction is prayer.
In his Inaugural Address in 1961, President Kennedy ended with these words: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you-- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
In the years that have followed, the opening lines of that peroration have never been forgotten. In fact, "Ask not . . ." has been chiseled in granite monuments throughout the world.
But they weren't Kennedy's most important words on that cold January day.
Those came at the very end.
Those came at the very end.
Kennedy was no stranger to tragedy. His life had been regularly marked by it, both with the death of close siblings and his own near death in the South Pacific during World War II and from Addison's Disease in the years that followed.
Nor was he a stranger to prayer.
Long before that fateful day in 1963 in Dallas, he had been administered the Last Rites of his Church on a number of occasions, and his closest companions all report that he habitually prayed, even before an afternoon nap. He did not by any means wear his religion on his sleeve, and his wife even remarked that it would have been a shame had he lost the Presidency in 1960 on account of being a Catholic in view of the fact that, in her mind (and -- as events have later confirmed -- in ours as well), he wasn't a particularly good one.
But he didn't hide behind God.
And we shouldn't either.
The Parkland tragedy -- like the Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and Columbine tragedies before it -- was preventable. To either eliminate those killings or significantly lessen their number, all we needed was stricter gun control laws -- bans on assault weapons, multi-clip magazines, and sales to any with the hint of mental illness; better background checks; closing gun show loopholes; a tort regime that holds manufacturers who flood low-control states with guns knowing they will show up in high-control states responsible for the ensuing death; and a Constitutional sanity that does not turn the Second Amendment into the present-day holocaust machine the Founders never intended it to be.
God won't get us any of this.
Legislators who aren't in hock to the NRA will.
The problem with Republicans who offered prayers yesterday is that this is all they offer.
So, while more children are killed with assault weapons delivering instant death, and more families are destroyed by the preventable violence our guns uber alles culture makes possible . . .
Here's my prayer for them . . .
God help you.
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