THE HEART OF A BIG CITY GOES OUT TO A SMALL TEXAS TOWN
They were family, and we mourn their deaths.
We’re of a mind today, like everybody else, to talk about what’s wrong in America that a young man with a military- style gun could walk into a church in a tiny town and kill 26 people. We have thoughts, as you might guess, about the irresponsibility of our nation’s gun laws and the violent streak that runs through our country.
But at a time when so many Americans have lost faith in each other, when we seem to be at each others’ throats in a culture war that denies the basic decency of both sides, we above all want to express our sorrow for the horror visited upon our fellow Americans on Sunday.
Chicago is a very big city, and Sutherland Springs, Texas, is a very small town. But we understand what it is to lose a parent, a child, a sibling or a neighbor to sudden and awful violence. We see it every day. It breaks the heart.
Chicago is about as racially and ethnically diverse a city as you will find, while Sutherland Springs is almost all white, and it’s hard to overstate in these polarized times just how much distrust such differences can sow on both sides. But we see families who went to church in Sutherland Springs in just the same way that families go to places of worship in Chicago, looking to be better people.
Sacred space is sacred space, and the outrage when that space is violated is the same wherever.
Chicago, we should add, is politically blue while Sutherland Springs is red. Our city voted for Hillary Clinton for president, whileWilson County, Texas, of which Sutherland Springs is a part, voted almost three- to- one for Donald Trump. But if on Saturday that might have seemed like a big distinction to us, on Sunday we couldn’t have cared less.
On Sunday, we saw only family, 26 of our fellow Americans, dying in church pews.
In that spirit of being one American family, and not in the cartoonishly divisive tone of cable TV or talk radio, we do want to call— once again— for greater sanity in our nation’s gun laws.
We are under no illusion that more gun restrictions will end the gun violence— but they could help. And it is entirely possible to craft smarter laws that take the most awful guns out of the hands of dangerous and unstable people without taking ordinary guns from law- abiding Americans who use them for legitimate purposes, such as hunting and protecting their homes.
Are there absolutists on the left who would take every gun from every American? You bet. Just as there are absolutists on the right, best represented by the National Rifle Association, who would oppose laws that keep guns out of the hands of even toddlers.
But the great majority of Americans— every survey backs this up— fall solidly into the commonsense middle when it comes to gun control. If only the politicians would listen to them and not to the NRA.
The killer in Sutherland Springs reportedly used a Ruger AR- 15, a knockoff of a standard semiautomatic military rifle. It is not designed for hunting or protecting the home. It is designed to kill soldiers in combat in large numbers. Its sale actually was prohibited by a federal assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004.
We— the reasonable majority of Americans across the political spectrum— should demand a ban on that gun, as well as on all other semiautomatic and automatic weapons. We should insist on more stringent licensing of gun stores. We should support a ban on the easy sale of weapons at gun shows and garage sales.
On Monday, President Trump called the slaughter in Sutherland Springs a “mental health problem” and not “a guns situation.” But of course it is both. Assault weapons are a violence multiplier. When a deranged person goes on a rampage, a military- style weapon can assure him a large body count.
A more general and related problem is that the United States, always a violent country, is at the moment a particularly angry and resentful country, with everybody nursing their grievances. We are living in a winter of discontent, and our president feeds off it. In Trump’s world view, to be a “loser” is the greatest shame, and to punch a critic is no shame at all. This does not help. We must increase gun safety. We must reduce gun violence. And, for all our differences, we must do more to be one country, in it together.