The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has spent more than 50 years calling for gun safety laws in the face of gun violence, because we understand that being faithful stewards of the Gospel requires us to challenge the systems and structures that keep all life from flourishing. The church is called to join with God in manifesting here on earth the kingdom that Isaiah envisions: a kingdom where weapons are beaten into plowshares and children learn the ways of war no more (Isaiah 2:4). In 2010, the 219th General Assembly of the PC(USA) adopted the most comprehensive gun violence prevention resolution promulgated by any Christian denomination in the United States, titled “Gun Violence, Gospel Values: Mobilizing in Response to God’s Call.”
Yet Presbyterians know that the gun violence epidemic in the United States has only gotten worse in the decade since this resolution was approved. Every single day, we bear the trauma of mass shootings, family gun violence, suicide, homicide and unintended shootings. By 2021, gun violence surpassed motor vehicle accidents, poisoning and cancer to become the leading cause of death in children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Why do we have so much gun violence?
The primary reason is that we have underestimated the greed and political power of the gun industry, whose profits soar with every school shooting. We have also underestimated its ability to exploit our fears and create its own culture. Because a gun is a nonconsumable product (meaning it lasts indefinitely – it does not get used up like toilet paper or wear out like a car), gun manufacturers must create continual demand for their products and bring in new customers to keep their factory doors open. The simple fact is that nothing sells guns better than gun violence, according to a 2022 NewsNation article. The more gun violence we have, the more people buy guns. And the more guns we have, the more gun violence we have. This continuous, self-sustaining loop only benefits the gun industry by promoting gun sales and also the politicians who cater to gun extremists for votes.
The simple fact is that nothing sells guns better than gun violence, according to a 2022 NewsNation article. The more gun violence we have, the more people buy guns. And the more guns we have, the more gun violence we have. … We are now in an era of building a sustained and strongly connected movement to intervene in the repetitive cycle of gun violence.
In her 2018 book How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t, Leslie R. Crutchfield compares the National Rifle Association (NRA), with its success at influencing legislation, to groups in the early days of the gun violence prevention movement.
“Great movements have at their core strongly connected grassroots members,” she notes in the book. Until Moms Demand Action formed after the massacre of six- and seven-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, no sustained grassroots gun violence prevention movement existed. No one effectively countered the NRA’s decades of effort to nurture intense personal bonds that built trust and enabled the quick mobilization of its members whenever it needed not only to change laws but to create a culture that views guns as sacred.
The Sandy Hook shooting birthed local and national grassroots efforts to prevent gun violence, including the witness of the church. We are now in an era of building a sustained and strongly connected movement to intervene in the repetitive cycle of gun violence. Change happens not just from the top down but also from the bottom up. A 2022 poll by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that the majority of Americans – including gun owners – want common-sense gun safety laws. To overturn decades of the gun industry’s grassroots organizing, which has created a gun culture in which lawmakers prioritize gun industry profits over public safety, all of us – every person, congregation, presbytery, gun owner and non-gun owner – must take action.
How can Presbyterians save lives from gun violence?
Aware of the need to expand the church’s gun violence prevention efforts beyond policy to action, the 225th General Assembly of the PC(USA) in June 2022 focused on practical steps and launched the Presbyterian Decade to End Gun Violence. Nicknamed “The Decade,” this project will bring together all areas of the church to unite Presbyterians in this work. I hope that your congregation and presbytery will participate in this historic project in some way. The Matthew 25 initiative will expand to include gun violence prevention and focus on the disproportionate impact gun violence has on people of color. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, “Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to die from gun violence and 14 times more likely than white Americans to be wounded.”
The General Assembly also called for developing new resources for congregational study and action, including a sequel to the film “Trigger” from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
The Presbyterian Decade to End Gun Violence is a new and still emerging collaboration across the church that will work on better ways to support violence interruption programs, build safer green spaces and decrease our own reliance on guns for protection.
Direct action: Guns to Gardens
One exciting new initiative to intervene directly in gun violence is the Guns to Gardens movement. With the support of the 225th PC(USA) General Assembly, Presbyterian congregations and others are learning to use their parking lots to provide a much-needed service of decommissioning unwanted guns to get them out of homes and communities, rather than returning them to the gun market where they could do harm. This service is important because the past decade has seen an extraordinary increase in gun sales, many to first-time buyers in states that have no training or safe storage requirements. Although the gun industry’s pervasive message is the lie that we are safer with guns, data collected by Stanford University show the reality: Having a gun in the home vastly increases the risk that occupants will be killed by a gun in an unintentional shooting, suicide or homicide.
My organization, the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF), has developed action circles to learn with and from others the best practices for holding a Guns to Gardens event. The Guns to Gardens model we share at PPF is based on the response of Community United Church of Christ in Boulder, Colorado, after a mass shooting in 2021 at a King Soopers grocery store blocks from the church. The concept is this: Invite persons in your community to safely surrender guns that they no longer want. Dismantle the gun by cutting it with a chop saw. Send the leftover parts to the organization RAWTools or to a local blacksmith to have the parts turned into garden tools or works of art.
So far, more than 200 hundred individuals, representing 100 congregations from nine denominations and 10 organizations, have participated in action circles. Guns to Gardens can use the skills of many folks in your congregation to take care of publicity, provide pastoral care for those who bring guns, operate the power tools to dismantle them, and safely handle the guns themselves.
PPF has partnered with other organizations across the nation to organize two national Guns to Gardens event days. The first was on June 11, 2022. The largest number of guns surrendered on that day was at the Guns to Gardens event held at La Mesa Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, which partnered with New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence and dismantled 240 guns.
More than 1,000 unwanted guns in total were dismantled at locations across the nation that day.
volunteer at La Mesa Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
decommissions unwanted guns.
The second national day was held in December 2022. In some places the weather might have kept gun owners away, but it did not stop volunteers from Oakland-Cambridge Presbyterian Church, a small congregation in Wisconsin, from partnering with Jeff Wild, a retired Lutheran pastor turned blacksmith, to chop up six guns.
You do not have to have a big event to make a big impact. Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church in West Virginia held a private ceremony to dismantle the guns of just one gun owner. The church brought healing to all who attended that day.
The Guns to Gardens event was incredibly healing for me personally as a survivor of gun violence,” Pastor Gusti Linnea Newquist told me, “and a powerful witness to the transformation in society that can make a difference”
PPF offers action circles throughout the year. Sign up for the next action circle on PPF’s website: presbypeacefellowship.org/gun-violence.
Advocate for policy and cultural change
We know that common-sense gun laws save lives. That is why the PC(USA) has long advocated for policy changes such as comprehensive background checks. In 2022, the General Assembly endorsed a new gun relinquishment protocol established by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence and Firearms. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, women in the United States are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in similar nations, because more than two-thirds of intimate partner homicides are committed with a gun. And numbers from Everytown show intimate partner violence has been identified as a predictive indicator for future violence toward children and others.
A massacre of Sunday morning worshipers at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, left 26 people dead, including an unborn child, and 22 others wounded. The massacre could have been prevented if this gun relinquishment protocol had been in place, along with a statutory requirement for background checks on all gun purchases.
The protocol creates a framework that courts can use to enforce current federal law, which prohibits a domestic abuser from possessing a firearm. Advocating with your county and city officials to adopt this protocol and save lives by getting guns out of crisis situations is a great project your congregation can take on.
Survivors of gun violence from Southern New England Presbytery brought forward a Commissioner’s Resolution at the General Assembly to honor the lives taken within their presbytery 10 years before at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a man slaughtered 20 children and six adults after he got access to his mother’s assault-style rifle. The presbytery’s overture directs Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) to bring an option to the 226th General Assembly about making firearms and related components (such as bullets) an altogether restricted investment category for the church, just as gambling, alcohol and tobacco currently are restricted.
The overture called on MRTI to engage in dialogue with companies that sell guns, specifically Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Kroger, to convince them to stop selling all firearms. One of the gun industry’s strategies to normalize guns in our society and thereby create future customers is to place guns wherever children can see them. We can add pressure to companies that sell guns (especially assault-style rifles) in full view of anyone under age 21 by taking photos of the displays and using social media to let them know you do not want your children exposed to guns while buying clothing or a soccer ball. You can also join Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City in their letter-writing campaign to Bass Pro Shops and Camping World USA, asking these businesses to stop selling assault-style guns and high-capacity ammunition magazines.
If we engage only in prayer and awareness building, we may get stuck in feeling overwhelmed and helpless, as our bodies’ natural freeze response to trauma becomes activated. Studies in trauma show that moving our bodies and taking actions to repair and restore are how we unfreeze the overwhelmed feelings that get stuck in our bodies, and we become open to new possibilities.
These actions can change our culture. Your congregation can also change the culture by joining the effort to normalize asking whether friends and family have a gun in the home and how the gun is stored. We want to normalize asking about guns in the home before you send your child to a playdate, caretaker or relative’s home — just like you would ask about food allergies, pets or swimming pools. Have your teens ask about guns before going to a babysitting job or entering a new housing situation. Ask about guns if you know a person is in a crisis or can no longer safely handle a gun due to arthritis or increasing dementia. Asking saves lives and encourages a culture of responsible gun ownership.
Prayer and action
On our website, PPF also has a Gun Violence Prevention Toolkit for congregations that you can download for free. The toolkit is full of resources like book studies, films, worship liturgies, direct action suggestions and advocacy guidance. The toolkit also includes case studies of congregations that have already acted.
and eventually shaped into garden tools or works of art. Here, Jackie Hibbard
is making a stool from a gun.
We have noticed that congregations that take consistent action have a regular practice of praying for those impacted by gun violence. First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas, held a service of lament in front of their church on the streets of downtown Dallas, where those in attendance joined Moms Demand Action and called their elected representatives to urge them to ban assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. First United Church of Oak Park, Illinois, created a prayer scroll that hangs from the cross in its sanctuary; the names of victims of gun violence are added to the scroll each week. First and Franklin Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, uses purple ribbons in worship to represent each life taken by gun violence during that week. After worship the ribbons are hung outside the church building for the community to see, and eventually they are taken on visits with lawmakers, as the congregation advocates for solutions to gun violence in the community.
These congregations know that prayer and study alone are not sufficient. We must also take action to demand gun safety laws from our elected officials and to change the culture around guns. If we engage only in prayer and awareness building, we may get stuck in feeling overwhelmed and helpless, as our bodies’ natural freeze response to trauma becomes activated. Studies in trauma show that moving our bodies and taking actions to repair and restore are how we unfreeze the overwhelmed feelings that get stuck in our bodies, and we become open to new possibilities.
While we may feel like we are not making progress as gun violence continues to rise, change is happening. Gun sense candidates are winning elections. Nine states have banned the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons. Congress passed the most significant federal gun safety legislation in 30 years: the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022. Not so long ago, both political parties cared about their NRA rating. But now many candidates care about being designated a “Gun Sense Candidate” by Moms Demand Action.
Church leaders often tell me that they are afraid to talk about gun violence because angry church members will accuse them of being political. Such an accusation is by design. A great example of the NRA’s organizing efforts, this talking point was created to silence churches that are naturally concerned about the loss of life resulting from the gun industry’s products. The late James E. Atwood wrote in his 2012 book America and Its Guns: A Theological Expose: “Gun violence is no more a political issue than drunk driving, selling crack cocaine, or arson.”
While you may choose to be silent when it comes to gun violence, out of concern for who you may anger, your silence also sends a message to those most impacted by gun violence (women, children, youth, LGBTQ+ and people of color): Their trauma and suffering don’t matter.
In his commentary on the Sixth Commandment, “You shall not kill,” Presbyterian founding father John Calvin argued that this commandment not only forbids killing but carries the obligation to prevent harm, preserve life and build shalom, or peace, in human society. Since God commands us to not kill but rather to be for life, we are compelled to order our life together by working for policies that promote tranquility and remove harm. While you may choose to be silent when it comes to gun violence, out of concern for who you may anger, your silence also sends a message to those most impacted by gun violence (women, children, youth, LGBTQ+ and people of color): Their trauma and suffering don’t matter.
For decades, our country has been running an experiment: prioritizing gun industry profits when writing legislation. This experiment has led to easy access to guns, which in turn has resulted in staggering rates of gun violence and a demise in public safety. It is time to say enough. It is time to reignite the imagination of a nation traumatized by violence and to remember we are Easter people. I invite you to join with me and others in building God’s kingdom, where all life flourishes and is free from violence, right here on earth.
