Prayer For Shooters who Mass-Murder Children

Hate and revulsion seem insufficient and too simple.

Dear Lord:

This day we plead for killers.  We plead mercy for shooters who stalk corridors, hunting innocence. We pray for the agents of random personal death. We pray for the planners, mechanics and pilots who rain death without notice.  We pray for victims, combatants and civilians,  both guilty and innocent.  We pray for the collaterally damaged, the burned and wounded

We pray for the tormented and for sound sleepers.  We pray for the self-righteous who embrace principles and deal tools that so easily transform suicide into slaughter. We pray for horror's enablers. 

We plead for those who transform specific horror into general fear, paranoia and trembling terror.  The immediacy of media changes five deaths at 1000 miles into killers lurking in shadows.  We pray that these indiscriminate killings, the natural flowering of a society saturated with death tools, sow seeds of understanding in our souls.  O Lord limit the casualties of this terrible plague to the necessary.  Particularly we plead for those of school age now traumatized by the sacrifice of their fellows. May they reach adulthood understanding that the idolatrous worship of weapons is truly an abomination.  May the great hoes of the law be brandished to check the flourishing of these fiery thorns.

We are not innocent, only ignorant.  Our parents firebombed entire cities that we might live and not others. Incandescent phosphorous melted into living flesh.  Surely there are enough burnt bodies, sufficient stench.  Surely we must inherit some consequences.  We get through each day like children walking in fog. Worlds of significance are erased with each death.  We  could not live without the systemic rebirth of ignorance.  We move forward uncomprehending.  Humans cannot live without faith.  Perhaps faith in some future better life. Even if our faith looks like no faith.  We wonder anew what life means precisely because those who knew are all gone.  Graves of meaning, dust of significance.

Plants and animals don't consider these questions.  Life just grows until it does not. The young are cruel out of ignorance.  The old are cruel out of disappointment.

As children we learned to sleep well because closet monsters are imaginary.  Now we aren't so sure.  That quiet kid two blocks over might be buying body armor.  Somewhere familiar, people will burn heretics and drown witches again. 

Perhaps the, O Lord, we will return to the sanity of earlier times that recognized these rapidly repeating tools of specific death have no place in human society.  Save us from the greed of firearms manufacturers and the machinations of their perfidious associations.  Let them forge guns into rolls of galvanized, corrugated steel so that we, your children, may have reliable roofing in future to shelter beneath.  If not roofing, may they manufacture some equally useful steel form.

O LORD, save us from this plague.  Knowing their own deaths are imminent,  but having tactical vests like the leather corsets of Gurkhas, killers draw out their last moments for more.