People walk past a memorial site following Jessica Rekos' funeral Mass at St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, Conn., Dec. 18. Photo: CNS.

 

If good can come out of evil, then it has done so with the transformation of President Barack Obama from the sealed-lips on gun control to the saddened eulogist at Sunday’s memorial service in Newtown, Conn., for the 27 victims, mostly grade-school children slaughtered by a gun-wielding 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who had also just killed his own mother.

“We can’t accept events like this as routine,” Obama said, although he and most Americans have been accepting them as routine for years. While we have consoled the survivors and offered our prayers, as a people we have accepted the killings, in the sense that we have not risen up and demanded that they stop. Rather, the nation seems to have lived with recent massacres—in far-away locales like Virginia Tech, Columbine High school, and Aurora, Colorado — the way we live with tornadoes, shipwrecks and the bombing of cities in Gaza as sad bulletins on the evening TV news, not as something we are obliged to do something about.

Nevertheless, since Friday’s story first broke, multiple voices, now including Obama’s, have cried out “Enough!” “Are we really prepared to say we are powerless in the face of such carnage?” Obama asked on Sunday. “That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” Yet, that is exactly what we have been saying.

Yes, there are studies that indicate that the public, including many gun owners, has been open to a variety of gun-control suggestions; but the National Rifle Association, with additional funding from the gun manufacturers, has taken an absolutist position, even leading to recent state laws allowing gun owners to tote their weapons virtually everywhere—church, shopping malls, theaters, parks—as if they were appendages of the human body. Now that it is even suggested that the school teachers should have been armed, the next logical step is to arm the students so they can protect themselves.  Newtown is peppered with numerous unlicensed private firing ranges which make the neighborhoods sound like machine-gun battles; a recent fad is to load targets with an explosive called Tannerite, which detonates when hit, a big BANG sending shockwaves through the area. Indeed Adam Lanza’s mother was an enthusiastic gun collector, until he aimed one of them at her head. Will the slaughter of the town’s children make them reconsider their attachment?

Doug Kmiec, the Catholic law professor whom Obama made an ambassador, writes in the Huffington Post that he lost a family member 20 years ago by handgun violence in a Chicago book shop, and that no NRA bumper sticker stating that it is people who kill people satisfies his loss. We have become a nation of killers, he says, and have justified it with a false conception of freedom. Film, TV and video game violence, abortion and capital punishment have cheapened life. Add two long wars and the drone strategy that has killed innocent thousands.

Kmiec excoriates Justice Scalia’s opinion in Dictrict of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 as the basis of the “false freedom to justify the unjustifiable.” The reasons given for gun ownership in the Second Amendment are no longer relevant: militias no longer exist to fight off invading armies, suppress insurrections, become a large standing army or resist tyranny. Today’s gun in the house is often used to kill and family member, sexual rival or an intruder who could have been chased out or otherwise overpowered.

As a result of our loose gun policies, the rate of deaths from firearms in the United States is eight times higher than any developed country; the deaths of U.S. children under 15 is 12 times higher than in 25 other industrialized countries; more preschoolers are killed in any year than law enforcement officers in the line of duty; and the United States has the highest rate of youth suicides and homicides among the 25 wealthiest countries. The lesson is clear: more guns equals more murders.

Clearly the emotional reaction to the Newtown murders is broader and deeper than other tragedies because the victims are little children and their teachers. It is more natural to feel the horror of the event. But now we come to the second idea of Obama’s key sentence: Are we willing to accept the deaths of our children to satisfy the wide desire to own guns? If Obama uses all his God-given gifts to reasonably disarm America, he deserves the enthusiastic public support of every religious person, especially those in authority with access to the pulpit and the media, who consider themselves pro-life. The question is clear: What do Americans value more? Our guns or our children?

Son of Raymond A. Schroth, of Trenton, N. J., a World War I hero and editorial writer and reporter for the Trenton Times, Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald Tribune for over 40 years, and of Mildred (Murphy) Schroth, of Bordentown, N. J., a teacher in the Trenton public and Catholic school systems, Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., has spent his life as a Jesuit, journalist, and teacher.

After graduating from Fordham College in 1955--where he majored in American civilization, studied in Paris, and was editorial editor of the Fordham Ram--he served as an antiaircraft artillery officer in Germany for two years and joined the Society of Jesus in 1957. Ordained a priest in 1967, he obtained his PhD in American Thought and Culture at the George Washington University and taught journalism at Fordham until 1979. During that time he was also associate and book editor of Commonweal magazine.

After two years as academic dean of Rockhurst College in Kansas City, he became academic dean of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. In 1985-86 he held the Will and Ariel Durant Chair in the Humanities at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City. From 1986 to 1996 he taught journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans and was adviser to the Maroon, its award-winning newspaper. In 1995 the Southeast Journalism Conference named him Journalism Educator of the year. In 1996 he returned to Fordham as assistant dean of Fordham College Rose Hill and director of the Matteo Ricci Society, which prepares students to compete for prestigious fellowships. Meanwhile, from 1967 he served as a resident faculty member in the student residence halls.

He has published eight books, including: The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper (Greenwood); Books for Believers: 35 Books Every Catholic Should Read (Paulist); with Jeff Theilman, Volunteer: with the Poor in Peru (Paulist); and The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (Steerforth), a biography of the CBS commentator.

In 1999 he moved to Saint Peter's College, where he wrote two books: From Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Person's Journey through Great Religious Literature and Fordham: A History and Memoir, (Loyola Press in 2001-2002). In 2000 Saint Peter's College named him the Jesuit Community Professor in the Humanities. In Spring 2003 he was made editor of the national Jesuit university review, Conversations and will continue to serve in this position until 2013. His The American Jesuits: A History, (New York University Press, 2007), was followed by Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress, (Fordham University Press, 2010). He taught a graduate journalism course at NYU in 2004 and journalism history at Brooklyn College in 2006.

In recent summers he has traveled to Gabon, South Africa, Peru, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, France, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, and China to educate himself, write articles, and take pictures. In 2003 his National Catholic Reporter media essays won the Catholic Press Association's best cultural columnist award. His over 300 articles on politics, religion, the media, and literature have appeared in many publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review, Commonweal, America, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, Kansas City Star, Boston Globe and the Newark Star Ledger, where he was a weekly online columnist for several years. From time to time he lectures and appears on radio and TV. He is listed in Who's Who and Contemporary Authors. In his free time he swims, bikes, walks, reads, goes to movies and restaurants, and prays.