How do people reconcile their refusal to consider sensible gun legislation with the carnage in El Paso and Dayton today?  Deaths which came on top of a shooting last week at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy CA, a Walmart in South Haven Missouri, Six people dead in Chippewa Falls WI and Thirteen people shot at a playground in Brooklyn NY.  Fifty-four  people have been  killed and one hundred and sixteen wounded in mass shooting in  the US since last Saturday.

If these deaths  were the results of a viral infection there would be an outpouring  of resources to fight the epidemic. But, today again, we wring our hands. One groups continues to say that nothing significant can be done to change anything. The other group demands some type of legislation to reign in the terror of gun violence. Once again we polarize over what can and can’t be done. Meanwhile people grieve their dead, tend their wounded and bemoan the state of the nation.

There are so many mass shootings we can’t keep them straight anymore.  And each one seems to feed into another disturbed person’s  reason to shoot and kill and main and injure other people.   Rhetoric  incites, social media inflames,  video games glorify, but a gun in the hand of a disturbed person kills.  When are we going to collectively decide that we don’t want to live like this anymore?   When are we going to stop sacrificing on the altar of gun rights and start talking about  the right  to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

When are we going to start valuing each precious life stolen by guns as important enough to do something?

When are we going to stop doing and saying the same things over and over and over again?

When are we going to finally put protections in place?

“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  Micah 6:6-8