...release week. It looks different than I'd planned.
I don't want me to be writing about this either.
My book releases in two days. After a decade of working toward the goal of becoming a published author, it’s finally about to happen.
But it doesn’t feel the way I thought it would. Because earlier this week, less than half an hour from my home, a person with a gun walked into a school and killed six people. Three of them were only nine years old. In the time I’ve spent working toward publishing a book, they were born, lived their entire lives, and died.
The shooter entered The Covenant School—a private Presbyterian school for children in PreSchool through 6th grade—at 10:13 am Monday morning. At almost precisely the same time, I was filming my very first TV interview with Today in Nashville, a local talk show highlighting all the great things our city has to offer. The show was scheduled to air from 2-3 that afternoon. We filmed it at the WSMV4 studios, which is located less than five miles down the road from Covenant.
Obviously, it didn’t air then, although I’ve been told it’s aired in reruns. (And it’s online now. You can watch it if you’d like.)
I have drafts of I’ll Stop the World saved on my computer that are older than the children who died.
I was going to go to a rally in Nashville today demanding our state representatives take action on gun control. But I got the time mixed up in my head and by the time I realized my mistake, I would’ve missed practically the whole thing. My head is a little scrambled this week. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why.
I wish we didn’t need a rally. It seems ridiculous that we do. Because it should be obvious that the only thing that has been consistent in every mass shooting that has ever taken place in our country has been guns.
The morning of the Covenant shooting, the Washington Post published an article titled "The Blast Effect,” detailing what a bullet from an AR-15 does to the human body. In painstaking detail, the article explains what happened to the bodies of two actual shooting victims: Noah Pozner, who was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 at age 6, and Peter Wang, who was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 at age 15. Both families consented to the 3D reconstruction of their precious children’s catastrophic injuries for public consumption, in the hopes that maybe, somehow, it might finally make a difference.
They had no way of knowing that later that same day, mere hours after the article was published, yet another shooter would take the lives of three more children with the exact same type of weapon that stole Noah and Peter from the world.
It has been over a decade since Noah was killed at Sandy Hook. He would be finishing up high school now. Peter would likely be in college. Instead, they are gone forever, and their parents are still fighting for their deaths to matter.
It took more than 24 hours for Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, to make an appearance addressing the Covenant School shooting. When he did, it was in the form of a five-minute prerecorded video in which he discouraged his constituents from even discussing policy changes and encouraged them instead to pray. As if those two things are mutually exclusive. As if his elected role is pastoral rather than political.
Even if he was a pastor, and not an elected government official, Lee should know that one can both pray and act. In the Bible, Jesus did it all the time. There are even multiple Bible verses urging followers of Jesus to do both, with one of the most well known being James 2:14-17, which reads:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (NIV)
It’s not exactly an obscure verse. Lee claims to love his Bible, so I’m sure he’s familiar with it. Yet in his role as governor, in a time of tremendous mourning and crisis, he speaks only of faith, and makes only a vague commitment to eventually take action at some point in the undefined future, but not today, claiming that now is not the appropriate time for action. It is a dereliction of his duty as an elected official, as well as a perversion of the scripture he claims to follow.
I have no problem with thoughts or prayers. Ever since I first heard about the Covenant School shooting, I haven’t stopped thinking about the seven people—including the shooter—who died. I’m sure many of you haven’t either. And plenty of people take comfort in prayer and believe in its power to bring about change.
But prayer is not the only tool we have to bring about change, and when people are dying—children are dying—shouldn’t we use every tool we have at our disposal to stop it? As governor, Bill Lee has more power than most to bring about change. And he has—by making it easier for people to obtain and conceal guns. By doing away with permits and refusing to pass a red flag law that would have restricted firearms access to people who are considered a threat to themselves or others, Lee essentially held the door open for potential mass shooters to obtain their weapons as easily as picking up a six-pack of beer from Walmart. (And maybe even easier, if his administration winds up lowering the permitless carry age to 18.)
Meanwhile, he feigned at action by signing an executive order on “school safety,” which places the responsibility on schools, parents, students, and law enforcement to work harder to not get shot, rather than making it harder for people to attempt to shoot them in the first place. The order talks about enhancing school security measures and rehearsing intruder drills and increasing parent communication, never mentioning that all of this is moot if the shooter has a weapon powerful enough to blast through locked doors (which surveillance footage shows is exactly what the Covenant shooter did).
Do you wish I would stop talking about this and get back to books? So do I.
But as my friend Tyler pointed out in his latest newsletter (which was then republished as an op-ed by Religion News Service, and which you should definitely read in its entirety, since Tyler managed to eloquently put into words so many of my own thoughts), the pandemic of gun violence in our country has been inherently politicized since before little Noah Pozner walked through the doors of his elementary school for the last time. The only way it stops is through political action. And although I have far fewer tools in my belt than Bill Lee, I will still use the ones that I have to try to move the needle.
So right now, two days from my book launch, when I thought I would be excitedly talking about my first book signing or reminding everyone about the preorder campaign, I’m writing about this instead. Because although it’s true that guns can’t kill people without a person to pull the trigger, they sure do make it a lot easier for people to kill people. And as a parent who cannot promise her own children that they’re safe at school—the best I can do is assure them that, as scary as it feels right now, the odds of them getting murdered at school (a thing I did not worry about even a single time when I was in high school, but that my children worry about every day) are still pretty low—I would really like for it to be less easy for people to kill people.
I am not an elected official. I do not have the power to write laws.
But I am not powerless. Neither are you.
I am a writer. I use words to move people. Typically, my goal is to move them to think or to feel or to imagine. But today, I’m hoping my words can move some to act. If you’re in the U.S., you can act by contacting your representatives in Congress.
Demand that they pass the Assault Weapons Ban. We had one once, but it expired in 2004. In the decade after it expired, mass shootings increased by 183%.
Demand universal background checks on all firearm sales and transfers.
Demand they close the Charleston Loophole, which allows individuals to obtain firearms without a completed background check if it has been more than three days since the background check was initiated. Background checks that take more than three days to complete are 4x more likely to uncover information that would prohibit that individual from owning firearms. Yet by the time that information comes back, it’s too late; they’ve already got their gun.
Demand they pass the Age 21 Act.
You can also call your governor and push for similar measures to be implemented at a state level.
None of these measures are perfect. But something is better than nothing, and evidence suggests the impact would definitely be something.
You can get involved with groups pushing for gun reform, such as Moms Demand Action, March For Our Lives, or Everytown, and participate in the rallies, protests, walkouts, and other local initiatives that they organize.
No matter where you live, if you are financially able, you can donate to groups fighting for gun control, such as Sandy Hook Promise or The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (in addition to the organizations mentioned in the previous paragraph).
And you can pay attention. You can research. You can learn. You can work to be part of the solution.
We can refuse to throw up our hands and accept the murder of children and teachers in their classrooms as normal. We can refuse to believe the lie that there’s nothing we can do (in other countries, firearm-related fatality rates plummeted following the implementation of stricter gun control laws). We can refuse to believe the lie that a dead shooter with no further casualties is a “best-case” scenario, and remember that without access to guns, no one has to die at all.
We can refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We can refuse to give up. We can use our voices and our money and whatever tools we have to claw our way forward, even if all we gain is an inch at a time.
And yes, we can think and we can pray. We can grieve. We can and should feel these losses, and lament the hole left in the world where these precious humans should be.
It’s not a matter of grief or action. We can do both.
Tomorrow, maybe, I will send out a newsletter that’s actually about book things. I actually did have a lot of fun updates this week. But I’m not there yet.
I started this week still energized from the weekend excited about all the fun things on the horizon. That changed on Monday. I am fortunate; I only suffered an unaired TV interview and a few days of grief and emotional anxiety. My book will still launch on Saturday. I still get to hug my kids and tuck them into bed at night. I still have so much to look forward to.
Thirty minutes up the road from me, the families of Covenant School are not so lucky. Today, my heart is with them as they grieve the lives and the futures that were so violently extinguished, and are forced to learn to live in a world ripped apart by bullets.