Gun Violence: The Greatest Moral Failure of Our Time

 As a mother sprinted barefoot toward her children’s church in Minneapolis, where a mass shooting had erupted, my own grandsons—just two years old and three months—were locked down in their daycare minutes away. The photo shows her terror; my grandsons’ question the next day revealed mine. As I lay my grandson down for a nap, he looked up at me with wide, unknowing eyes and asked, “Will I be safe?” “If I were honest, I would have said: No, you might not be. Because you were born in a country that claims to value you before you are born—to win votes—but once you arrive in this world, that value disappears.”

In America, children have become collateral. Collateral for political power. Collateral for religious agendas. Collateral for an industry that has persuaded us to treat weapons of war as sacred, even as we render our sons and daughters expendable. We allow them to be murdered in their classrooms, their churches, their neighborhoods—not because we lack the means to stop it, but because too many adults have chosen silence over courage. And so we have built a nation where the stock market is guarded with ferocity, while the safety of our children is surrendered with a shrug.

I do pray, just as the politicians tell me to. And when I do, God whispers back: Use your brain. Use your heart. Protect and love all the children. Yet it breaks me to see how we squander that sacred charge—to watch lawmakers trade children’s lives for campaign donations, to watch communities normalize lockdown drills as if they were no different than fire drills, to watch parents tuck their children into bed with a silent prayer that they will survive math class tomorrow.

After 9/11, when terrorists attacked our nation, we changed everything about how we fly. Airports were transformed overnight. Security tightened. New systems were created. Because we decided no American should die that way again. Yet when it comes to gun violence and the mental health crisis we have in this country, we’ve done nothing. The truth is, we have addressed neither of these. We have failed our children at every turn.

We are a nation obsessed with guns and violence, and we are reaping the bitter harvest of that obsession. In other countries, children attend school without fear of violence. Other countries suffer grief, yes, but not at this scale, not with this regularity, not with this cold-blooded acceptance.

The question is not whether our children are safe. They are not. The question is whether we, the adults of this nation, will continue to accept a culture that values guns over life, profit over people, and power over innocence.

My grandson’s question will haunt me: “Will I be safe?” The only honest answer I can give is this: You will be safe when we—the so-called grown-ups—find the courage to protect you. You will be safe when we stop waiting for miracles and start demanding change. You will be safe when we choose love over fear, children over cowardice, and life over death.

My friend Skip Humphrey once told me that whenever anyone complained to his father, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, he would stop them mid-sentence and ask: “What are you going to do about it?” So now I ask you the same. Because the shooter did not act alone, we are all complicit if we continue to elect legislators who block even the most basic gun reforms.

We can solve this. We must solve this. Until we do, every child in America remains one bullet away from becoming another headline—and that is the greatest moral failure of our time.