Opinion | The Nashville Shooting Is a Signal To Country Music to Help Stop Gun Violence.
If conservative Christian gun lovers want a calling to put down assault rifles after the tragedy at Covenant College, they want look no additional than Isaiah 2:3-4, the Scriptures’ peace crusader passage, wherein swords are overwhelmed to plowshares and spears to pruning hooks. In the event that they want a soundtrack, they want solely crank up Johnny Money’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” written by Kris Kristofferson, a sharpshooting veteran turned peace activist. Within the music, a non secular journey throughout a sabbath-day hangover returns the singer to one thing that he’d “misplaced by some means someplace alongside the way in which.” The nation neighborhood has misplaced its manner if it thinks proudly owning an AR-15 is extra vital than a baby’s proper to soundly attend faculty.
At a vigil in entrance of Metropolis Corridor, simply 48 hours after the shooter, who was being handled for an emotional dysfunction, arrived at Covenant College armed with three weapons, together with an AR-15 military-style rifle — all of them authorized in Tennessee and bought domestically — I stood in entrance of a grieving viewers alongside my very own third grader, my son. Earlier that day at Episcopal College, each of my youngsters had skilled their first lively shooter-training drill. My daughter complained to me that she’d gotten an unfortunate place on the desk her instructor instructed them to crawl behind. “If there had been a shooter, I most likely would have gotten shot,” she stated with a nervous snicker.
Earlier than getting into the semicircle of supporters onstage on the vigil, which included the primary girl, Jill Biden, and Nashville’s mayor, John Cooper, my son and I practiced the music we had been set to carry out. He performed the harmonica whereas I softly strummed on the banjo, kneeling close to the Metropolis Corridor elevator banks, not removed from metro particular operations law enforcement officials who carried semiautomatic lengthy weapons which can be practically similar to AR-15s, authorized for buy by all eligible Tennessee citizenry. My son didn’t appear to note how shut he was to those closely armed figures in physique armor. He was too targeted on his harmonica.
When my son and I had been led to the microphone, I discovered it tough to carry again my tears as I sang the nation music hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” It’s a music that’s widespread at funeral processions, its lyrics stuffed with references to heaven and family members lengthy missed.
As I sang alongside my very own third grader — one simply as purely harmless as those whose lives had been snuffed out earlier that week — a strong thought came visiting me: What if Nashville might be the final cease on this horrible runaway practice of faculty violence, the place the place the cycle may lastly be damaged?
