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Dear Centenary Family,
Like most of you, I have been thinking a lot about the mass shooting that occurred Tuesday evening at the end of the Huguenot High School graduation ceremony at the Altria Theater. That’s a familiar spot for most of us in the Richmond area. It’s just a 4-minute drive from Centenary. Our friends at The Pace Center for Campus and Community Ministry, led by Rev. Katie Gooch, have spent much of their week working with VCU students and others traumatized by this event.
There’s much to grieve about this event. A young man who’d just graduated and his stepfather lost their lives. Accounts suggest some kind of long-standing dispute led to this violent outburst that not only took two people’s lives but led to other injuries. Violence like this always has a ripple effect. In a communication to parents of students in Richmond Public Schools, Superintendent Jason Kamras tried to explain his rationale to parents disappointed about the closure of schools following Tuesday night’s events. In part, he wrote:
"I made this decision for two reasons. First, our teachers and staff – across the division – are emotionally depleted. For many, this latest tragedy was deeply re-traumatizing, as they have had to deal with countless other shootings and deaths in their careers. In short, many in the RPS family are barely holding on. Second, when shootings like this happen, I always fear retaliation and copycat activity – particularly with an incident as public as this." (How Graduation Day shooting is impacting all Richmond Schools (wtvr.com)
Gun violence traumatizes the immediate victims, their families, and witnesses. It also traumatizes those who try to offer aid and assistance to those victims. As the Superintendent notes, dealing with gun violence or the threat of gun violence, is exhausting.
We have had 31 homicides this year in Richmond. Data on non-fatal shootings is hard to uncover, but not a week goes by that we don’t hear of several. Think of the ripple effects of those 31 deaths to date.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of May 31 over 17,000 people in the U.S. had died in 2023 as a result of guns, including by suicide. The number includes 109 children under the age of 12. Think of the ripple effects.
Doctors think about the ripple effects of gun violence. They’re the ones on the front lines in emergency rooms who try to save people’s lives when they’re shot. Doctors see gun violence as a public health crisis. I learned this when I was collecting books and articles on gun violence after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 in preparation for a series of ecumenical, interfaith dialogues we were working on with Second Presbyterian Church. Some time after those discussions, one of the physicians in our congregation shared with me an issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It contained a long, scientific study of gun violence in Australia. After dealing with the problem of mass shootings which so often involved the use of semi-automatic rifles and pump action shotguns, those kinds of weapons were banned and a program of buyback of firearms was initiated. The study revealed that by 2006, a decade after these measures were introduced, no mass shootings had occurred. Proving cause and effect is never straightforward, I realize, and American culture is different from Australian culture, but those measures appeared to have saved lives. Think of the ripple effects a few changes in public policy might make . . .
It seems that pure, raw anger might have been the motivation for what happened Tuesday night. There’s a lot of that in our world today. Anger has its own ripple effects.
What does it mean to be a church that loves our city in its moments of violence, trauma, and grief? What does it mean to be a church in a time when anger easily spins out of control? Can we embody the practices of patience and forgiveness we see in Jesus? Can we offer to the world a witness of other ways to deal with our disagreements? Can we show the world what it means to rely on the presence of God to guarantee our safety and security, rather than the world’s obsession with arms and weapons?
It’s not easy to be the church in such places, in times like this. But think of the ripple effects…
Peace,
Matt
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