Some thoughts from Pope Francis and United States Catholic Bishops Conference “Can violence achieve any goal of lasting value? . . . Violence is not the cure for our broken world. Countering violence with violence leads at best to forced migrations and enormous suffering, because vast amounts of resources are diverted to military ends and away from the everyday needs of young people, families experiencing hardship, the elderly, the infirm and the great majority of people in our world. At worst, it can lead to the death, physical and spiritual, of many people, if not of all." Pope Francis, Message for the World Day of Peace, January 1, 2017.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has written about gun violence and gun control.
In November 2020 they stated: “We support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children or anyone other than the owner), and we reiterate our call for sensible regulations of handguns.” (Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice.) In January 2020, the USCCB published “A Mercy and Peacebuilding Approach to Gun Violence”. For many years the bishops have supported a number of measures to address the problem of gun violence.
These include:
• a total ban on assault weapons, which the USCCB supported when the ban passed in 1994 and when congress failed to renew it in 2004.
• Measures that control the sale and use of firearms, such as universal background checks for all gun purchases; • Limitations on civilian access to high-capacity weapons and ammunition magazines; • A federal law to criminalize gun trafficking; • Improved access to and increased resources for mental health care and earlier interventions; • Regulations and limitations on the purchasing of handguns; • Measures that make guns safer, such as locks that prevent children and anyone other than the owner from using the gun without permission and supervisions and • An honest assessment of the toll of violent images and experiences which inundate people, particularly our youth. Submitted by Jeanne Schepers