The radical spirit of the Homewood gun buyback
Ashooting outside the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross in Homewood last November left two people dead and the community asking the usual question in the wake of what has become a bloody routine: why?
The question is mostly pro forma at this point. There is no one answer as to why shooting and killing another human being is seen as the court of first and last resort for so many people, especially those contending with desperate circumstances.
What is unusual about that November double homicide is what it inspired some months later. On Monday, the day set aside for the annual celebration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr., the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross opened its red doors at 10 a.m. and invited the community to participate in a communal sacrament of peace — a gun buyback.
In cooperation with the Episcopal Lutheran Alliance, Homewood Ministries and several concerned members of the community, Holy Cross was able to raise $5,000 for an effort they were told by local police might yield 100 guns if they were lucky. Usually gun buybacks result in a net of a little more than half that number.
But the people of Homewood would not be denied. As 10 a.m. approached, some residents lined up outside Holy Cross Episcopal Church like those black voters who, in the early ’60s, decided they’d defy the Jim Crow laws to assert their dignity and their right to vote.
Forty-five minutes after the doors opened and the buyback began, the entire $5,000 had been claimed. The inventory of weapons taken off the street was more than they could possibly have imagined. Holy Cross confiscated a total of 148 guns that will be melted down and destroyed.
The weapons included an AK47 and an AR-15, but mostly they were handguns (104), rifles and shotguns (44). The former owners of the weapons turned them over for less than market value just to be rid of them, though many were probably barely functional. Still, the likelihood of suicides, accidental shootings involving children and moments of rage turned homicidal were dramatically lessened with the buyback.
Though the money ran out long before the advertised 3 p.m. deadline, people continued to drop their weapons off as if a high-caliber offering basket were being passed around. It was a heartwarming sight for the organizers of the buyback, though there was some grumbling about the cash being depleted so quickly.
The fact that the gun buyback happened on MLK’s designated holiday — the 91st anniversary of his birth — is the kind of bittersweet irony that America routinely stirs up for its people.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. More than half a century later, his legacy continues to be linked to the trajectory of an assassin’s high-caliber bullet. On a Thursday evening in a very troubled spring, America lost the greatest prophet of nonviolence it would ever produce.
But there’s a remnant of MLK’s spirit in every radical action like a gun buyback. While there are scoffers who mock the quality of the guns turned in, in the real world, even rusted long guns are capable of killing if they end up in the wrong hands.
The guns turned in to Holy Cross this week were humble, but deadly. There’s no telling how many of them have already been accessories to shootings they’ve never been connected to. All of them, unless they were incapable of firing at all, would have been a danger to the community sooner or later if they had been stolen or fired in anger.
The success of the gun buyback on MLK’s birthday should inspire other churches and local institutions to emulate Holy Cross’ example. Given the hundreds of thousands of loose guns circulating in this region, it doesn’t make any sense to limit the buyback to one day in mid-January.
This might be something that the richest churches, synagogues and mosques in the area might consider funding in partnership with the foundations for a year just to see what a recurring monthly bounty for guns yields in communities where homicide is a daily insult to the human spirit.
There probably would be no bigger tribute to the spirit of MLK than an effort to rid the streets of loose guns in his name. It would be peace bought for pennies on the dollar. Though cheap in the larger scheme of things, it wouldn’t be any less miraculous.