In recent years, time after time, the AR-15 or one of its close cousins has played the starring role in an American mass shooting. In Las Vegas it shared a macabre double-billing with the semiautomatic version of the Russian AK-47. Chattanooga. Orlando. San Bernardino. Aurora. These two and the like are nearly always there.
And there is a reason. Because of the weapons’ quasi-military design, even an unskilled hand can pull the trigger 40 times in a minute. A typical hunting rifle will hold several rounds. A typical AR-15 magazine holds 30. There are at least five million AR-15-type weapons in this nation alone. Sturm, Ruger & Company, the Connecticut company that made the weapon used here, reported $664 million in net sales last year.
Here in Texas, the politicians have come and gone, visiting Sutherland Springs on a raw, rainy Wednesday night, making empty calls for prayers and excuses for inaction, as when Vice President Mike Pence awkwardly intoned, “Words fail when saints and heroes fall.” Indeed, they do. The words, bereft of real meaning, just blow away into the cold north wind. He appears to forget his purportedly deep religiosity.
Christianity demands action. It insists on the protection of the innocent. In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas justified war in self-defense, but he also opposed the killing of innocent civilians. “Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly,” according to the Cambridge divinity scholar Daniel H. Weiss, “is never justified.”
