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Our Journey Beyond the God of Violence
The consciousness of fear won’t go away, but our sense of what constitutes power over it—what constitutes God—must, and will, continue to evolve.
Sep 07, 2025
Who am I (now)? I’m still trying to figure this out. It’s a harder job, I fear, even than putting all my dishes, all my clothes, all my books and miscellany away. I have moved, as I’ve noted, from my house of 40 years—from the city of Chicago, where I lived for almost half a century—to a retirement community in Appleton, Wisconsin, to be near my family.
Yeah, it’s called a retirement community, not an old folks’ home or some other cynically realistic name, which is fine with me, even though, dadgummit, I ain’t retired. But as I sit at my computer today—my primary writing day—I feel the urge to retire, aka, give up, shrug, and do nothing except kill time. At the same time, a terrifying cry rips through me. I’ve gotta keep writing! Never has this cry felt more urgent.
My life is totally different now, but my journey, to face the soul of the unknown, to carve understanding from it and put it into words, continues. Yes, things are different. The unknown is larger and more profound for me than it’s ever been. and I feel, in a way, more lost than I’ve felt since childhood. So my writing has to confront a paradox. How can I presume to write with certainty if I don’t know what I’m talking about? I see only one way forward: Intensify the honesty I bring to my words—personalize it—and in the process turn certainty into complexity.
I say this as I try to transition beyond the sheerly personal columns I’ve written in the last two months, as my life has changed, and look again at the world at large, which, oh Lord, continues to run amok... from the school shooting last week in Minneapolis to the bombing and starvation and endless horror in Gaza and around the world, which “world leaders” continue to inflict on those dubbed the enemy, or children of the enemy (and thus the future enemy).
This is my world. I feel, ever more deeply, the dehumanization that is inextricably a part of the global boundaries—national and personal, political and spiritual—we have created, and which we sustain with an us-vs.-them militarism that puts the whole planet in danger. Even as I age, I cannot let myself grow dull to this. I can only scream: No-o-o-o!
And I quote part of a poem I wrote in the wake of the 1999 Columbine massacre, about a vigil gun-rights advocates held in defiance of President Bill Clinton’s visit to the site of the horror. They held signs that said “Gun Control Kills Kids” and “We Will Never Give Up Our Guns.” The poem is called “Vigil.”
...I am in awe
of the deadeye imperturbability
of the armed righteous,
who look upon the world’s suffering
and see targets.
They stand in potent prayer
with hands clasped
and arms extended,
judgment on a hairtrigger,
God in the recoil.
I believe them.
I believe they believe
in their own innocence
and the innocence of guns,
to clean, to cradle,
to cherish and employ.
What you have to understand
is the good they do,
picking off home invaders,
the furtive dark-clad,
the malevolent, the incomprehensible,
the hungry.
More innocent still
is the worship of guns
and the worship of the gods
they allow us to become...
The consciousness of fear won’t go away, but our sense of what constitutes power over it—what constitutes God—must, and will, continue to evolve. This is the hope I pray and bleed for. This is the hope I carry in my heart as I hobble through my new apartment, reminding myself that our journey isn’t over.
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Why We’re Gaslit on Guns and Don’t Know It
What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less the gun lobby’s money than the ideology that it’s been spreading for years.
Aug 29, 2025
“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday, August 27 at a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.
Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation. To license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.
Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75% of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, however, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits. The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.
There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have both wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.
“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” US President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton. He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.
This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth. Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank. Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.
Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown and Columbine. But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.
Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
Donald Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.
President Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay. Even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.
This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why President Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.
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Minneapolis Mass Shooting Exposes Trump-GOP Lies on Crime and Gun Violence, Critics Say
"Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids," said one healthcare advocate.
Aug 27, 2025
Another horrific mass shooting that left multiple children dead and injured has once again ignited a wave of fury at Republican lawmakers who refuse to take action to stop gun violence.
Two children—ages 8 and 10—were killed when a shooter fired through the windows of a church at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. Another 17 people, including 14 more children, were also injured in the attack before the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Minneapolis police say the shooter carried out the attack, which is now being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, using three weapons: a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, not even eight months into 2025, there have already been 286 mass shootings—defined as cases in which four or more people are shot or killed—in the United States just this year, averaging more than one per day.
Gun violence is the number-one killer of children in the US, causing more deaths each year than car accidents, poisonings, and cancer. The victims of the shooting in Minneapolis join the more than 800 children killed and more than 2,200 injured by firearms this year.
Like dozens of mass shootings before it, Wednesday's deadly attack has stoked calls in Minnesota and around the country from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for stricter gun laws, which have been repeatedly shot down by Republicans in Congress.
"We need better laws on the books nationally," said Minnesota's Democratic senator, Amy Klobuchar. "When you have so much access to guns right now and so many guns out there on the streets, you're going to continue to see these kinds of mass shootings."
"Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. "These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church."
"They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance," Frey said. "These are the sort of basic assurances that every family should have every step of the day, regardless of where they are in our country."
Congress has not passed a significant piece of gun legislation since 2022, when it passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
That law, which was supported by just 15 Republicans, introduced some modest reforms—including extended background checks for firearm purchasers under 21, funding for state red flag laws, and the closure of gun purchasing loopholes.
However, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) only agreed to negotiate the bill if Democrats abandoned more ambitious reforms, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.
Since its passage, even this watered-down piece of legislation has been fought aggressively by Republican lawmakers backed by the gun industry's lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, who have attempted to have it repealed.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to present an action plan to reverse any law that the Department of Justice determines has "impinged on the Second Amendment rights of our citizens."
Through executive orders, Trump has rolled back efforts under the Biden administration to regulate ghost guns and enhance background checks.
The administration has also choked off more than $800 million in grants to local gun violence prevention groups and pushed for "concealed carry reciprocity" legislation, which would require all states to honor concealed carry permits issued by other states.
Instead of stricter gun control measures, Trump has personally advocated for schools to arm teachers and focus on improving mental healthcare—even as he's rolled back rules ensuring Americans have access to that care.
"Until we have more elected officials willing to place gun safety over allegiance to the gun lobby, more and more families will face unbearable suffering from random acts of violence," said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Wednesday. "Congress could—and should—pass stricter gun safety laws, but continues to cave to the gun lobby."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added: "The United States continues to be the only country where school shootings are a regular occurrence. We must stop this epidemic of gun violence and finally put the lives of our kids first."
Other advocates noted the contrast between Trump's response to the imaginary "crime wave" in Washington, DC, where he has initiated a militarized takeover, and his lack of interest in fighting America's endless wave of gun violence.
"Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in the US," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. "Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids."
Charles Idelson, a former communications director for National Nurses United, said: "If Trump wants to pretend he is 'fighting crimes,' stop protecting the pro-gun violence cabal."
Update: This report, which originally referred to the shooter as a "gunman" has been corrected to accurately reflect new information about the gender identity of the shooter, who has been identified as Robin Westman, a transgender woman.
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