The Thursday edition of the New York Daily News bore the headline, “God Isn’t Fixing This”.
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Murphy, who’s running for Senate in 2016, released a statement today calling for “sensible gun violence prevention policies” in the wake of Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in which 14 people were killed. “But what’s so offensive to me is we do nothing”. The Daily News also provided a round-up of responses from candidates and gave this assessment: “Prayers aren’t working”. But opinion split nearly evenly over whether enacting new laws to reduce gun violence or protecting the right to own guns was more important. Whatever one thinks about God or prayer or, for that matter, gun control, this is a bad development for a society already fractured in too many ways. I didn’t even know that was a thing, but it is. “I’m sure he’ll continue to pray for this nation”.
“We do believe that God can intervene, to comfort the hurting and even to energize ourselves and others for right action”, he said. Religion is frame through which many people make sense of disasters.
On social media and in some news outlets, prayers-especially from Republican politicians, were less welcome.
A disability services center in San Bernardino, California, was not safe. Civilians couldn’t leave their hometowns and rush to the scene of the crime. Let’s have that debate.
With the latest mass shootings in Paris, as well as in Colorado and California fresh in the public’s mind, Democrats argued sentiment was again turning in their favor on gun control. We agree on that. Women account for 50 percent of the victims in mass shootings, compared with only 15 percent of overall gun homicides, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, based on media reports from 2009 through July. Still, that’s a debate worth having. They had traveled to the Middle East in recent years, and had a weapons stockpile that suggested they were on a mission, as law enforcement officials described it. But those calls always fade quietly due in large part to the gun lobby’s control of Congress. Yet, that doesn’t preclude the necessity for Americans to have a meaningful discussion about gun control. “No, we’re not listening”, writes Jesuit priest James Martin.
Hashtag activism has become, in many ways, our new secularized form of praying.
There’s a lesson about this in the Bible too, said Coyne, who recited the Bible passage James 2:16: “If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed, ‘ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”
The tweet garnered 18,500 retweets and 13,800 likes, making it one of the most shared tweets from the paper’s account this year.
But those messages are becoming totally hollow and meaningless when they’re not accompanied by any suggestions for action. The first response to a word of our fellow citizens in peril should be a human response of empathy. After all, that’s what prayer calls us to do. It shouldn’t mean an immediate search for who is to blame for holding the wrong opinions.
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The reaction on the right was swift. It is led by students who, though they managed to get into the greatest universities in the country, seem never to have been taught to love the little amendment that guarantees free speech and free religious observance, the two pillars without which America collapses. And social media outrage can’t fix that.
