When a teenager shot and killed another at the Shaker Heights library this week, my family was buffered by privilege, but not by distance. As it happens, I had driven by the library about the time of the shooting, en route to a pastoral visit, and then learned of it soon after in a text to all families in the Shaker Heights school district: there had been an incident, and that Shaker Heights High School students had been involved. We’d have to wait a little longer to find out what happened. When we did, we called our next-door neighbor, who not only works at the library but walks to work each day, to see how he was doing.
I live in what – in many ways – is an idyllic location for families with children: nestled between the library and several schools, including the high school, my children can walk to both. The tragic shooting – that left one dead and another saddled for life with the burden of having taken the life of another – occurred right where we live, and we were keenly aware of it. I’m on a text thread of neighborhood dads – “Chadbourne Dudes” is the name of the group – and could see that Jo and I are far from the only parents concerned for safety and heartbroken at what happened.
I do not wish to offer simple answers in moments of pain like this, though I take it as a given that guns turn angry disputes into deadly ones and that the widespread availability of firearms, in the aggregate, make our communities far less safe. We must interrogate and dismantle the deeper conditions that lead people to believe that they must own a gun in order to be safe. But before that, we have to take seriously the conditions that lead people to fear enough that they choose to carry.
Most importantly, we must sit with the grief of the loss of human life. This was a reminder for the families on my street that no one is immune; yet the deeper call is to hold the pain felt by parents and siblings who have now lost their beloved: in prayers, but also in our communal consciousness. May God be with them in their pain, and may our compassion lead us to action.
Faithfully,
The Very Rev. Bernard J. Owens