We Must Rise Up Against Guns

by Nancy Dodson
Scarsdale Meeting

The Peace Testimony is the impulse that drove me to Quakerism, and keeps me engaged still. It stays with me during silent worship. No matter where my thoughts begin at 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday, my mind comes back time and again to the main destroyer of peace in our country: the guns that litter our landscape. 300 million guns, in fact—in homes, in cars, strapped to people’s belts. Being picked up by angry aggrieved men, by desperately lonely people, by stressed and scared teenagers, and by curious little children.

I once heard an activist say that a gun is a nuclear weapon. This is true. In an instant, a gun can destroy a human life in a mushroom cloud of violence, and then destruction radiates out in waves around that life. When I was in my pediatrics residency, two little boys were orphaned when their parents died in a gun murder-suicide. The little boys waited in the emergency room overnight while awaiting a foster home. The school-age boy drew with crayons while the social worker tried to explain “your mother is dead.” The infant, exclusively breastfed until that moment, fussed while the weeping nurses encouraged him to drink from a bottle. In the early morning they were carried out of the hospital to meet their strange new caregivers. What is this scene, if not a scene of nuclear destruction?

Several members of NYYM have begun to gather around this issue: to teach each other the science of the issue; formulate a vision statement; and carry out public actions such as a gun buyback. In this setting, I feel free to speak in a way that is more raw and emotional than when I am in medical or scientific circles. I treasure this opportunity, because to me, guns are more than a public health problem. They are the moral failing of our time; the destroyer of childhoods, a social poison—their very existence is an insult to my sense of a human life. I hope that the Peace Testimony calls Friends everywhere in a similar way. Just as our faith’s “heroes” such as John Woolman and Benjamin Lay spoke irreverently and urgently about the threats to peace in their time, we must do the same in our time.

We cannot be held back by a false sense of sanctity about the Second Amendment. We must be loyal, first and foremost, to the Peace Testimony and the sanctity of human life. We should call out, through direct public action, the industry that produces increasingly lethal weapons and floods our streets with them–an industry that has rejected any and all regulations or safety measures. We should learn from other successful social movements in order to think creatively: for example, advocating for divestment and litigation–two powerful tools to weaken the billion-dollar gun industry and bring economic justice to its victims.

My prayer is that Quakers everywhere will join this movement and thus honor the Peace Testimony.