My Prayer for the Living

The lesson leaders should take from Monday's carnage

By Keel Hunt

Did you know a military-grade assault weapon, of the type the Nashville shooter carried inside Covenant School on Monday, can literally fire hundreds of bullets per minute, depending on how it is configured?

It is so powerful and destructive that the Nashville shooter used it to blast quickly through two sets of locked school doors, before moving upstairs to spray bullets into a half-dozen human bodies, large and small. A pediatric surgeon said such wounds, especially to children, are “almost unsurvivable.”

And did you know? There is, in my view, a straight line connecting those awful murders and ugly terror at Covenant School two mornings ago and the day in 2019 when Governor Bill Lee and Republican legislators celebrated giving the gun industry what it wanted: Cancellation of most gun permitting for adults in Tennessee.

Tennessee’s Republican regime will deny this connection, of course, but don’t you believe them. Our policymakers were boastful at the time, crowding into the frame for official photo in fact - all eager to take credit, with Lee, for relaxing Tennessee’s gun laws, to suit the gun lobby and over the objections of law enforcement. Blood is on their hands today in Tennessee’s capital city.

On Monday afternoon, Nashville’s Police Chief John Drake told CBS News the Covenant School shooter had purchased seven guns at local area gun stores (though used only three of them in the attack at the school).

Two of those three guns were automatic combat-type weapons. The Monday attack was one more assault on civilization - and one more reminder that such menacing firepower, originally designed for military and law enforcement uses, should not be in the hands of civilians at all.

Metro Police showed, in their harrowing response to the shooter on Monday, the proper use of automatic weapons, but with the important advantage of extensive training. The caving-in to the gun industry, which Tennessee’s leaders agreed to in 2019, removed the requirement of civilian training.

Congress and Tennessee’s lawmakers, too, should firmly re-instate the ban on any civilian acquiring such murderous weapons – now.

Words matter, but we are not hearing any helpful words from state leaders in the wake of the Covenant School carnage that has devastated a half-dozen families in our town and terrified and alarmed thousands more. Instead, we have heard unhelpful words from duly elected “leaders” over the past 48 hours.

To be clear, and as an immediate first step, we don’t need any more of those vacuous “thoughts and prayers” messages from timid elected officials, high and low. We need action now. Civilization needs action now. City, state and federal government leaders must meet this moment, to rise above the idle game they play and go into an active mode to save children and families. That is my prayer for the civil defense of the (still) living in this awful moment.

Anymore, those “thoughts and prayers” dodges have cheapened our language, in service to their agenda of avoidance. It’s become Republican code for doing nothing, out of political fear, hiding behind an evasive piety that is irreligious and certainly non-Christian. The people who say those words, in my view, just want the news cameras to look the other way.

What we need is for every lawmaker, from Tennessee’s Capitol Hill in our town to the U.S. Congress in Washington, to do their jobs, meet this moment with clarity and courage. It’s not enough to parrot the gun lobby’s propaganda about the Second Amendment. Please save our children from any more bad policy.

This must start with straight talk and candor about life and death, and how lax gun laws put everyone at risk – and small children terribly so. Just as we were all called on Monday night to help our children through the hard day and evening with what to make of the murders on Monday morning, our elected officials need to hear straight talk from the rest of us now.

A good example was the comment on Monday from state Senator Heidi Campbell, a Democrat. She said of gun violence and lax gun laws: “It doesn’t matter what’s in your head or heart; it’s what’s in your hand.” Guns should not be so prevalent in our state and culture, and automatic weapons should be banned everywhere but for the military and law enforcement.

Take away these particular tools of death and human suffering, think about the defenseless children in Uvalde and Parkland and now Covenant School, and don’t be deterred by anything or any special interest from doing the right thing in this terrible time. We all must rise to this moment - and that goes for all our elected representatives, or they must be replaced at next Election Day by people with courage to act for humanity.

Remember how you felt on Monday when you heard the news of young lives lost, and the three adults who also didn’t make it home to the dinner table that night? Hold that feeling strong in your memory until politicians, state and federal, do the right about these weapons.

They are counting on you to forget all this between now and next Election Day.

That’s how they roll. Don’t let them get away with it this time.

© 2023 Keel Hunt