A gunman opened fire Wednesday in a midtown Atlanta medical building, killing one woman and injuring four more in yet another mass shooting. The last time there was a well-publicized mass shooting in Georgia, Republicans responded predictably by first thinking and praying out loud on social media and then deciding to loosen gun laws.
Time and again, our country’s safety and progress are stymied by conservatives in the pocket of the NRA and other Second Amendment interest groups. As news of Wednesday’s shooting washed over our country, Sen. Raphael Warnock gave a speech on the Senate floor about how frighteningly easy it is to be touched by the gun violence our country has been plagued by for decades.
Warnock spoke about the misapprehension that we are immune to gun violence when we’re sitting at home, watching it unfold elsewhere. The “assumption that this can’t happen to me ... It won’t happen to people that I love” is an illusion, the Georgia senator asserted, adding that we are all closer than we realize to a day when “this kind of tragedy comes knocking on your door.”
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Warnock then touched on his personal connection to the event in Atlanta: “I have two small children, and their schools are on lockdown responding to this tragedy. They are there. I'm here, hoping and praying that they are safe. But the truth is, none of us is safe." But, Warnock pressed, what are leaders going to do?
The senator also asserted that the constant refrain of “thoughts and prayers,” spoken aloud so often by leaders who sit on their hands while children bleed out in schools and in the streets, is hollow. The practice of saying it aloud, Warnock argues, devalues the spiritual practice of both. “It is to make a mockery of prayer. It is to trivialize faith,” he said.
