Paul Keenan
Archbishop Wenski 
The US Church continues to back sensible gun control policies, writes Paul Keenan
It remains hard for the average European to grasp the passion of debate surrounding guns in America.
Figures in the millions for purchased weapons and shooting victims in the multiple thousands prompt in the non-US mind a seemingly logical answer on the issue of gun control and an incapacity to reconcile the heated exchanges stateside, such as those now crackling across the airwaves in response to President Obama’s latest efforts to invigorate responsible limits on gun ownership.
One online publication, clear in its anti-Obama stance insisted that “Obama goes it alone on gun control” thereafter referring to the president as “the radical-in-chief” in its coverage of his plans for strengthened background checks and curbs on sales without such safety measures.
In a country so devoted to its constitutional protection of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, Obama is indeed ‘radical’ in daring to strike up a conversation about gun ownership and the control of firearms – the fact is he has done little more than this, respecting, no doubt, his nation’s founding documents, but also, it seems, from a weary knowledge that he can do little more than get people talking on the subject; if 20 small bodies scattered through the classrooms of Sandy Hook Elementary did not speak forcefully enough to the conscience of a nation in 2012, Obama’s teary-eyed appeals will have little better effect.
Disingenuous
But to allege that the president ‘goes it alone’ on the issue is completely disingenuous, as demonstrated by the intervention, on behalf of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, of Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, Florida, who serves as chair of the conference’s Domestic Justice and Human Development Committee.
“While no measure can eliminate all acts of violence which involve firearms,” the archbishop said in a statement responding to Obama’s moves, “we welcome reasonable efforts aimed at saving lives and making communities safer. We hope Congress will take up this issue in a more robust way, considering all of the varied aspects involved.”
Archbishop Wenski was echoed loudly by Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas, Texas, a gun-owner’s paradise, who acknowledged Mr Obama’s “courage” in making his stand on the nation’s “ludicrous” gun laws.
It is to be pointed out, at the same time, that this is not a new message from the Church. Far from it.
As Archbishop Wenski said in his statement, “for a long time now, the bishops of the US have called for reasonable policies to help reduce gun violence”.
That backing for policies goes back as far as 1994 when President Bill Clinton signed the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, a section of which enacted a 10-year ban on the manufacture of military-style weapons for sale to the general public. Sadly, but in tune with America’s waxing and waning levels of debate on guns, the 1994 Act was itself the culmination of debates then sparked by the 1989 Cleveland School massacre, in which a gunman opened up on children in a school in California before killing 32 others ahead of his own suicide.
Similarly, current debates were energised by the horrendous events of 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, which saw 20 children slaughtered along with six adults (using the very type of weapon – an AR-15 assault rifle – subject to the 1994-2004 ban; the weapon, perversely, saw a spike in sales afterwards).
Again, after Sandy Hook, the Catholic Church and other faith communities stood squarely behind efforts to address such horrors in the face of constitutional fervour backed by suited fronts for the weapons industry.
In a statement following that tragedy, the US bishops called “on all Americans, especially legislators, to address national policies that will strengthen regulations of firearms”. The Catholic Church stands blacklisted by the National Rifle Association for its pains.
While adhering to its mission of care for communities under threat of mass shootings in schools and cinemas in making such appeals, it is not to be forgotten that places of worship are no more immune than those other every day settings, as demonstrated by the nine dead inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston last June, and the close call experienced in September by Corinth Missionary Baptist Church in Texas when a ranting and armed Islamic extremist cancelled his mission of slaughter when Rev. John Johnson offered to pray with him instead. (Just days after the Corinth incident, Pope Francis made his historic speech to the US House of Representatives, singling out the arms industry for criticism.)
Words are far from the only input by faith communities, however. Very regularly, American media will highlight efforts by parish churches of various denominations in numerous communities backing gun amnesties, offering to fund such items as electronic tablets in exchange for illicitly held firearms, their existence a natural consequence of the saturated market in the US. (The gun used in the highly publicised attack on a police officer in Philadelphia last week was a weapon previously stolen from the home of another officer.)
The response to church amnesties demonstrates that they do not speak in isolation, but arising from the concerns of the very communities they serve.
Some flavour of this is contained in a poll conducted by the CNN news channel in the days before the president’s ‘Town Hall’ appearance on that channel to listen to and address perspectives offered from an audience panel on the issue of guns.
According to CNN’s findings, 67% of Americans voiced support for Mr Obama’s tentative efforts in tightening up existing gun control measures – such as the strengthened background checks measure.
This figure soars to 85% of people aligning with the president’s Democrats party (against 51% of Republicans). Sadly, however, fully 57% responded at the same time that they expected the president’s efforts to yield no reduction in gun deaths.
Conversely, however, it is not to be assumed that individual faith communities are therefore unified on gun control.
Take the Catholic Church, again in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. When the bishops spoke out in the wake of that tragedy, one online commentator, a self-described Catholic, said: “I have stopped my payment this year to my local annual Catholic Appeal in protest of this theatrical statement and the position to take away my rights guaranteed by the second amendment.”
No clash
Additionally, the US-based St Gabriel Possenti Society is actively lobbying the Vatican to declare its namesake, a 19th-Century Italian priest, as patron saint of handgun owners.
The group’s founder, Catholic John Snyder, has insisted there is no clash between his Catholicism and gun ownership and has dismissed Church input as “foolish”.
And so, based on available data from previous years, some 10,000 Americans will die in shootings across 2016, the overwhelming majority by fellow Americans.
As leaders talk and churches pick up the pieces, it remains for someone to satisfactorily explain how the victims’ constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness somehow came a poor second to the passionately defended right to bear arms.