O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?

These are the opening lines of the book of the prophet Habakkuk. They are my prayer after reading the news of a mass shooting, ever since the Sandy Hook shootings in Newtown, Conn. I have prayed them far too often in the past 13 years, often enough that I can recite them from memory as readily as the prayers of the rosary. (We will also hear them at Mass on Oct. 5.)

I prayed them again on Aug. 27, after the shooting at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis during a school-wide Mass. That prayer, along with so many others from so many grieving, hurting and angry people, remains unanswered, and only faith assures us that it does not go unheard.

In that space between crying out and waiting for an answer that does not come, it is all too easy to hurt each other further. Speaking at the scene of the shooting, which in this case meant in front of a church, Mayor Jacob Frey said everyone in Minneapolis “needs to be wrapping their arms around these families,” adding, “And don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”

The next day, both Mr. Frey and others were already weaponizing these words in a culture war. Mr. Frey posted his speech to social media, introducing it with “words aren’t enough” and framing it as a call for better gun policy. He was criticized by many, including both political and religious leaders, for appearing to denigrate the importance of prayer. Others cheered him on for calling out the seeming hypocrisy of praying without moving to take any political action.

I do not think that anyone was convinced in this skirmish, either by Mr. Frey’s comments or by the response to them, of anything other than that their political opponents had proven exactly as callous and hypocritical as they thought they were.

A few days later, Pope Leo XIV spoke about the shooting after the Sunday Angelus in Rome, switching from Italian to his native American English: “Let us plead God to stop the pandemic of arms, large and small, which infects our world. May our mother Mary, the Queen of Peace, help us to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah: They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

While I have no idea if this was his specific intention, I am struck by how the Holy Father’s words undercut the false dichotomy between praying in the aftermath of tragic violence and recognizing the evil of the means of violence. Naming the “pandemic of arms, large and small” does not dance around the need to address the ready availability of guns—but Pope Leo did not place his hope in recommending a policy, but in pleading with God to stop it.

At first, I found this turn of phrase odd. What, I wondered, did Leo hope God might do? On deeper reflection, I found this invitation to plead with God echoing for me the heartache of the opening lines from Habakkuk. The problem is that I no longer know what to hope for; I only know, 26 years after Columbine and 13 years after Sandy Hook, that we are still crying, “Violence!”

We should not despair of advocating for better and saner gun laws, starting with a ban on assault weapons. America has a long history, dating to not just before my missioning to the magazine but to before my birth, of calling for gun control. We also need to recognize, however, that our proven inability to respond to the particularly American scourge of gun violence and school shootings is not only a political problem but a spiritual one.

Something in our culture and our national psyche is enslaved to the logic of violence. Three years ago, writing in our pages after the Uvalde school shooting, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago said, “The Second Amendment did not come down from Sinai. The right to bear arms will never be more important than human life.” 

If it were only a matter of writing a better law, we would have done so by now. If it were only a matter of writing a better law, our regulation of guns would have been strengthened rather than weakened after Sandy Hook. Something else, something deeper, is broken.

Which is not to say that better laws cannot help. Laws are not only text and policy but symbol and teacher. It would mean something powerful to say in law, together as a society, that we have neither need of nor unfettered right to weapons that deal out death at scale. Perhaps saying that would also help, over time, defuse the twisted thinking of those who reach for such weapons.

But we need to want to say it, and we need to want to say it together, and right now we cannot. So we plead God to change in us whatever refuses to renounce such violence and to help us imagine cooperating with that change.

The opening lines of Habakkuk are not the only ones I hold onto. The prophet also reminds us that “there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay” (Hb 2:3).

Come quickly, Lord.

This article appears in October 2025.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.