Sen. Raphael Warnock: A nation that tolerates mass shootings is ‘in need of moral repair’
Sen. Raphael Warnock said that Saturday’s deadly shooting at Brown University is yet another reminder that America’s leaders need to do more to stop gun violence, and more proof that the nation is suffering from a spiritual crisis that bad actors prey upon.
The attack in Providence, Rhode Island, left two students dead and nine others wounded. It came on the same weekend that gunmen killed at least 11 people at a Jewish holiday celebration in Sydney, Australia — a grim competition for headlines.
“We pray prayers for these families. but we have to pray not only with our lips but with our action,” Mr. Warnock, a pastor and Georgia Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press. “Any nation that tolerates this kind of violence year after year, decade after decade in random places on our college and school campuses without doing all that we can to stop it is broken and in need of moral repair.”
Asked about the shooting in Australia, Mr. Warnock said the nation must condemn antisemitism and respond to its global rise.
“There are those who are trying to stock fear and hatred all across the globe, and what they are trying to do is convince us that our neighbors are enemies,” he said. “We have to reject that premise and recommit ourselves to building what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the beloved community.”
Mass shootings have plagued the United States. The Rockefeller Institute of Government reports that mass shootings have been steadily climbing since 1966, with 164 incidents since 2017 alone.
SEE ALSO: Person of interest in custody after shooting at Brown University kills two and wounds nine others
Lawmakers remain divided over how to respond, caught between limiting gun rights and enforcing the Second Amendment.
In 2022, President Biden signed the first major gun safety bill in nearly three decades. It expanded background checks to include juvenile records and encouraged states to adopt “red flag” laws intended to keep guns out of the hands of people with known emotional or psychological issues.
That legislation followed two mass shootings — one at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two adults and another in Buffalo, New York, where 10 Black people were slain in a racially motivated attack.
Still, since Mr. Biden signed the legislation, there have been roughly 50 more mass shootings in the U.S., according to the Rockefeller Institute.
At Brown, police say a gunman opened fire in a classroom as students studied for finals, spraying more than 40 rounds from a 9 mm handgun. A person of interest was arrested early Sunday at a hotel in Coventry, about 20 minutes from the campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat, called the attack “horrific.”
“We offer our great sympathy to the families and their friends,” Mr. Reed said.
Mr. Warnock said the nation must “keep the faith” in such a dark spiritual time.
“There’s a kind of spiritual heaviness in the land as people see a deepening and widening chasm between what they need from their government — everything as basic as the safety of their children when they leave them on a college campus or on a school campus, all the way to health care,” he said.
Mr. Warnock said that in the current environment, people are tempted to turn against one another rather than toward one another.
“That creates just the kind of atmosphere where strong men emerge promising to solve all of our problems in one fell swoop,” he said. “We have to resist that and recognize that the way to our own wholeness and well-being is to affirm the humanity of our neighbors.”
