ELCA Social Message: Gun-Related Violence and Trauma
The ELCA has adopted a social message about gun-related violence and trauma in April. Social messages are ELCA teaching documents that draw from existing social teaching but throw a fuller and sharper spotlight on a particular social issue. The message's themes focus on trauma, public health, and an ethic of shared responsibility for peacemaking, seeking to move beyond the strict polarization of gun rights vs. gun control.
This Message in Summary
Guns and gun-related violence and trauma are woven into U.S. history and society in substantial, complex, and problematic ways. The full social message therefore requires length, nuance, and complexity. This summary provides an overview of key aspects of the four sections, much like a map that conveys the main points of a complex landscape.
I. Introduction: God’s Resolve for Peace Abides
II. Seeing Trauma in Insecurity, Despair, and Mayhem
III. Countering Violence and Trauma as God’s Resolve for Peace
IV. Toward Shared Responsibility in What Makes for Peace
At its heart, this social message makes the case for reframing the gun debate and activity in the U.S. beyond gun rights versus gun control. The message commits the ELCA to a moral framework of shared responsibility that comes to terms with trauma honestly and seeks prevention carefully through a public health model. Such a model suggests individual and institutional practices that could reduce tragic, irresponsible, and illegal uses of firearms and their related risks and harms. This message argues that such a framework can open up constructive dialogue and action across many, many communities and should be publicly embraced.
Section I shows how this message builds upon the scriptural references, insights, themes, and commitments found in the ELCA social statement For Peace in God’s World and the ELCA social message “On Community Violence” and draws from others such as the social statement The Church and Criminal Justice. (Readers may review these at www.elca.org/socialstatements.) From a Lutheran Christian perspective, it returns to themes such as peacemaking and prevention that, too often, have been sidelined. It soberly charts the horrific facts and the disparities of age, class, gender, and race of the nearly 50,000 lives taken each year. It introduces, as well, two factors increasingly recognized by social science: the widespread effects of trauma and the rise of defensive gun cultures.
Section II explores the multiple, often unrecognized forms of trauma resulting from armed threats and shootings in which the perpetrator intends to harm others or self. These actions not only harm people physically but traumatize human spirits, families, communities, and the social order itself. The call to see trauma in this way expands moral responsibility for gun-related harm.
Section III reminds Christians of the centrality of Christlike service of neighbor in our social roles. It calls them, and all people of goodwill, to practice wise and proactive efforts to restrain gun-related violence and prevent it. This emphasis on prevention aligns the ELCA with a growing movement to approach gun misuse as a public health crisis. This section also recognizes that members of our church and society are divided in various ways and degrees about how to reduce gun-related harms. These divisions cannot be fully addressed in this message, and some of them call for further discernment, such as defensive gun use for example.
Section IV calls upon multiple types of secular communities to prevent violence and make peace. It spells out the responsibilities of communities as diverse as shooting associations and firearm defense groups, health care providers and firearm businesses. The section also describes the distinctive responsibilities of our church and other faith communities toward peacemaking. These include calls to bridge divides, build community, advocate policy, and care for the traumatized.
This message concludes that such a reframed understanding and practice in responsible communities can resist and reverse the immense and mournful toll of tragic, irresponsible, and illegal gun use in the UnitedStates today.
Download the social message below. This is the official text, but it has not yet gone through graphic design. A version in the official ELCA format will be coming soon, along with a Spanish translation and study guide.
The ELCA Church Council voted unanimously to adopt the social message on April 13, 2024. Before the social message was adopted, it went through a public feedback process. To read the official report on the public feedback, click here.