January 28, 2011
By Vicki Gray

Once I was a Foreign Service officer, a political officer trained to look at a host society and try to understand what makes it tick.

After many years spent living abroad, I've become accustomed to looking at my own country in much the same way: as an outside observer, seeking to make sense of an often-jumbled mosaic. And one thing I've always stumbled over – that makes no sense to me – is America's obsession with guns and our inability reasonably to regulate their possession.

How can one make sense of such inaction in a country where there are 90 guns for every 100 people – man, woman, or child – our nearest competitors being Yemen, a country afflicted by tribal strife and occupied in part by al Qaeda (61 guns per 100), and Switzerland, where every adult male is required by law to own a rifle as part of a well-regulated national militia (46 per 100)? Why do we tolerate more gun deaths every week on our city streets than on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq combined? How do we explain an annual rate of gun deaths 20 times higher than in any other industrialized democracy?

What does one say to a gun "enthusiast" who insists that our constitutional rights to a gun are "God-given rights" that "can't be infringed or limited in any way?" What can we say – in the wake of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson and the 10 police officers gunned down so far in January 2011 – to all the pundits, politicians and lobbyists who tell us there's nothing we can do to ban assault weapons or extended magazines, to tighten background checks, or close the "gun show loophole?"

It's as if we're trapped in a dark nightmare, powerless to escape – a dark night of our national soul.

Make no mistake: this concerns our soul. It is a moral issue of the first order, for which the exegesis is really quite simple. The Sixth Commandment says "Thou shalt not kill," or, as you will, "You shall not murder" – one and the same in my theologically simplistic mind. Guns are made to kill and, in the hands of people who are technically incompetent, emotionally overwrought, mentally disturbed, or just plain bad – read "evil" – they do.

It is incumbent upon a moral society to do what it can to reduce the number of guns and do what it can to keep them out of the wrong hands.

I believe it is the church's moral duty to take the lead in this regard. As Diana Butler Bass said in the wake of Tucson, "I hope that [our] sermons… will go beyond expressions of sympathy or calls for civility and niceness. Right now, we need some sustained spiritual reflection on how badly we have behaved in recent years as Americans – how much we've allowed fear to motivate our politics, how cruel we've allowed our discourse to become, how little we've listened, how much we've dehumanized public servants, how much we hate."

To remain silent at this moment is to risk sinning … by what we have not done.

In the Diocese of California, we have chosen to speak and act. At our Diocesan Convention last October, we resolved to support repeal of California's "Open Carry" law and "direct[ed] all congregations, schools, and diocesan institutions to ensure that no firearms, whether concealed or openly carried, other than weapons carried by law enforcement officers in the conduct of their official duties, be allowed on their premises."

It is my prayer that other dioceses and the Episcopal Church writ large will consider similar action. It is time to take the first tiny steps toward reasonable, responsible regulation of constitutionally legal firearms. If we can't start in our sanctuaries, where can we start?

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Vicki Gray is deacon at Christ the Lord Church in Pinole, California, and a member of the Peace, Justice and Hunger Commission of the Diocese of California. She served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer for 26 years.