{"id":5164,"date":"2015-10-01T21:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T01:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/?p=5164"},"modified":"2015-10-01T21:00:10","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T01:00:10","slug":"utterly-unacceptable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/2015\/10\/utterly-unacceptable\/","title":{"rendered":"Utterly Unacceptable"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"President<\/a>

President Barack Obama speaks in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015, about the shooting at the community college in Oregon. The shooting happened at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., about 180 miles south of Portland. (AP Photo\/Susan Walsh)<\/p><\/div>\n

photo credit<\/a><\/p>\n

Again and again and again.\u00a0 Gunshots ring out, students are dead.\u00a0 When will it stop?<\/p>\n

Our hearts go out to the community of Umpqua Community College in Oregon where yet another gunman killed yet more people who thought they were in a safe place of learning and intellectual advancement.\u00a0 As President Obama <\/a>said bleakly in his news conference yesterday evening, “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”\u00a0 When will we — We, the People who supposedly govern this nation — when will we do something about the endless carnage?<\/p>\n

This time last week we were reveling in the gauzy glow of good feelings that Pope Francis seemed to exude at every stop along his journey through Washington, New York and Philadelphia.\u00a0 But along with the bright smiles and cheerful waves, he had a very serious message for our elected representatives in Congress:<\/p>\n

\u201cYour own responsibility \u2026 is to enable this country\u2026to grow as a nation. \u2026You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. A political society endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.\u201d (Pope Francis addressing the U.S. Congress, September 24, 2015)<\/em><\/p>\n

That’s the best statement of the moral responsibility of lawmakers imaginable:\u00a0 they have a clear responsibility to “defense and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens,” to “demand pursuit of the common good,” to ensure the growth of the nation by protecting all members.<\/p>\n

Of course, Congress acted like bad boys with spitballs hidden behind their backs, returning to their customary disgraceful antics the day after the Pope left town, heedless and even contemptuous of his call to work together for the common good.\u00a0 And so it is, just one week after that moment of grace, more bodies lie bleeding their young lives away on classroom floors because this nation’s lawmakers worship at the altars of greed and self-interest.<\/p>\n

This is the same Congress, by the way, that cloaks itself in thunderous righteousness should any college or university suffer criminal actions on campus, since Congress sees fit to impose on collegiate administrators a standard that approaches what lawyers would call strict liability to protect students from any and all harms.\u00a0 While I surely do not shrink from my responsibility in this regard, how dare Congress hold me to the highest standard while allowing the most appalling dangers of virtually uncontrolled weapons to roam freely across the landscape, victimizing children in schools and people in churches while elected politicians protect their seats and pay obeisance to the gun lobby.\u00a0 Surely, the victims of gun violence,\u00a0especially those in schools,\u00a0are among “those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk” that Pope Francis insisted are those most in need of legislative protection.<\/p>\n

President Obama was right to call out the opposition today, saying that if they want to call his remarks political, so be it — as the\u00a0Pope himself said, political action is absolutely necessary to defend and grow the life of the nation.\u00a0 And let’s not allow those tired old refrains about “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” or “good guys with guns” to obscure the most fundamental issue:\u00a0 the prevalence of guns — enough guns for every single person living in America right now, and then some — is clear evidence of the violence of our society.\u00a0 The gun is the symbol of the evil that will not stop, the predator that makes everyone afraid and constantly wary, the ultimate sign of a society that has lost its moral center in a confused argument about words in a Constitutional Amendment\u00a0that meant something quite different in a colonial culture that existed 225 years ago.<\/p>\n

No justice, no peace, that is true.\u00a0 Getting a grip on guns in this country is a fundamental issue of justice; until that happens, there will be no peace.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getting a grip on guns in this country is a fundamental issue of justice. Congress needs to live up to its moral responsibility to act on behalf of all the people. Our hearts go out to students and colleagues at Umpqua Community College in Oregaon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[509,20,24],"tags":[1556,1559,564,360,1558,1557],"class_list":["post-5164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-human-rights","category-politics","category-social-justice-issues","tag-uccshooting","tag-college-shooting","tag-gun-control","tag-president-obama","tag-school-shooting","tag-umpqua-community-college"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitydc.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}