Again and again and again

It’s happened yet again.  Another school shooting.  This time it’s in Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.  A high school.  Four confirmed dead, more shot and wounded.  A fourteen-year-old boy has been arrested as the perpetrator and is alive.  At least four others will not go home to family tonight.  At least four others are experiencing the worst pain a parent could ever feel.  At least four other families are forever altered, broken, and crushed.
 
I am so angry and so sad!  Every time there is another school shooting, I ask myself, “How could this have been prevented?”  Every time, the answer is the same.  BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS!
 
My son-in-law is a hunter; he has been since he was a teenager.  He learned at his father’s knee, who taught him how to build a blind, how to move stealthily in the woods, how to aim and shoot to cause the least harm to his prey, how to dress his kill, and how to prepare the meat for eating and freezing.  I am not a hunter, nor could I ever be, but I respect his right to be one.  He is a responsible gun owner.  He secures his firearms with utmost care.  His father taught him well.
 
What his father also taught him is that no one other than those in the military service or the police ever need to own or fire an assault weapon.  The only thing they are good for is mass killing.  No hunter would ever use one to kill a deer.  Yet, time and again, somehow young men and, in this case a boy of fourteen, are able to obtain one.  Where did he get it?  How did he get it?  Who made it possible for him to get it?  Why did he get it?
 
I am at a loss.  Tears don’t make it better.  Time doesn’t either.  Prayers don’t fix it.  This is not God’s will!  God has nothing to do with this carnage other than the fact that humans have been given the tools to stop this…and we have yet to do so.  And lest you think that this couldn’t happen here, think again.  It can and it will.  It might not happen in Weymouth or Quincy or Abington, but it might in Rockland or Hanson or Holliston.  Until and unless we demand the killing stop, it won’t. 
 
This time the killer is alive.  This time questions can be asked of him.  This time he will be brought to trial.  Given all that, nothing he says can change what has happened.  Nothing he says can bring back those he shot today.  Nothing can explain his motives.  Nothing will change.
 
Today this is front page news.  Tomorrow it will be something else.  I, like you, will find a corner of my mind to place this so that I don’t go crazy.  I will post our church banner that states BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS outside of our church next week.  I will continue to rail against these atrocities.  But, make no mistake – this can and will happen again until we find a way to make it stop.
 
In sorrow, in anger, and with love,
 
Rev. Barbara Dingwall Mills
Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Weymouth