Please take a moment to imagine what the bullet-riddled body of a child might actually look like … How horrifying it would be to see flesh and sinew violently rended from bone. How terrible it would be to see a tiny body disfigured beyond recognition by bullets and shrapnel. How traumatizing it would be to realize that the dead child laying in front of you has been robbed of their future in the most inhumane way possible.
If the very act of imagining this murdered child is nauseating and gut-wrenching beyond tolerance to you, then just imagine how awful, devastating and traumatizing the reality of actually experiencing it must be. Yet, it is indeed the reality that the parents, loved ones, classmates, friends and teachers of the 44 communities that have already experienced a school shooting this year have had to endure. It is also the reality experienced by the 83 communities who suffered a school shooting in 2024, the 82 communities who suffered a school shooting in 2023 and the 80 communities who suffered a school shooting in 2022.
However, what is especially disgusting and frustrating about this senseless loss of American children to school shootings is the fact that everyone knows what the problem is: guns. Yet nothing ever changes. Instead, after a school shooting, the same cycle of revolting inaction plays out.
First, mental illness, not the prevalence of firearms in America, is named as the true cause of these mass tragedies. This deflective lie masquerading as a legitimate claim, of course, conveniently ignores the fact that while America has almost identical rates of mental illness to countries like Australia, Portugal and Spain, it experiences school shootings at rates 57 times higher than any of these other industrialized nations.
After this, politicians may then float around their perceived solution to this boogeyman of mental illness, proffering up the idea that there just needs to be more “good guys with guns” capable of stopping the next school shooting before it happens. Never mind the fact that America already has more guns than people in this country, or that armed responders have already proven themselves ineffectual and impotent when it comes to reducing the harm of shootings of any sort.
However, at some point in this process of creating a false cause and pushing a ridiculous solution to this false cause, a politician will commit the most egregious cardinal sin in all of school-shooting enablement, and put out a tweet with that infamous and empty set of words: “thoughts and prayers.” In the eyes of the Editorial Board of The Fordham Ram, it is this offering up of this sentiment of “thoughts and prayers,” while simultaneously doing nothing to curb the number and accessibility of guns in America, that is perhaps the most morally reprehensible and frustrating post-shooting action to witness. Not only is this phrase a vague nothing in terms of content (its specificity and ethos are akin to a Hallmark “sorry for your loss” card), but it also has no theological or practical ground to stand on. This is not to say that one should never pray for change or for the victims’ families to find peace, but rather that these prayers must be accompanied by direct action. This is not the opinion of this publication, but rather that of Catholicism’s leaders. Pope Francis, for instance, directly identified the solution to the struggle against gun violence with direct action: “In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.” Detroit Archbishop Edward J. Weisenburger made an even more direct plea for praxis in the wake of the recent Annunciation Catholic School shooting, saying “[A]s we pray for those whose lives were taken today, I also ask that our prayer be matched by firm endeavors to end the superabundance of handguns and assault weapons in our great nation.” The Interfaith Alliance likewise echoed this blunt sentiment in their respective response to the Annunciation School shooting, putting out a “stark reminder of … the urgent need for action to address gun violence.”
Thus, considering all this then, how can one possibly sit back and do nothing about America’s gun problem other than waxing poetic about mental illness and how many non-specific prayers are being sent a family’s way. The empirical and spiritual realities at play clearly call for the enactment of sweeping gun control — the parameters of which are better saved for another article — in the immediate now. In fact, this issue is not even one of moral, sociological or theological complexity, but rather one of simply taking direct action lest your community becomes the next one forced to deal with the trauma and horror of a bullet-ridden child. Thus, it is the opinion of this Editorial Board of The Fordham Ram that the “thoughts and prayers” should become a relic of days past, instead being replaced with something more practical: ceaseless action.
