Morris: As you read this, America’s next mass shooting is already being planned

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Minnesotans know too well the horror of watching a sanctuary turned into a slaughterhouse. The memory of the attack at Annunciation Church in southwest Minneapolis, where two children were slain and 21 others wounded, is still raw. And now, another community has been torn apart — this time in Grand Blanc, Mich., where a man drove a truck into a Latter-day Saints church on Sunday, set it ablaze and opened fire on worshipers. Four people were slain, eight more wounded.

What happened there is not an aberration. Threats against and random eruptions of violence in American houses of worship are no longer rare. Any gathering place can be shattered in an instant.

The Grand Blanc police chief tried to reassure his shaken town: “This does not define who we are.” But the truth is harder. In America today, virtually any public space is vulnerable. We live in the freest and most heavily armed country in the world, and that combination makes us uniquely exposed.

President Donald Trump was quick to call the Michigan killings “another targeted attack on Christians.” He urged prayer for the victims. Prayer is necessary. But as the Apostle James wrote, “Faith without works is dead.” Words alone cannot hold back the next bullet.

The violence will not end as long as too much of the nation clings to the fiction that easy access to military-grade firearms poses no danger. Responsible gun owners may sincerely believe the problem lies only with the unstable or the wicked. But the truth is unavoidable: Their choices shape the landscape in which those unstable and wicked find means to an end.

It does not have to be this way. America has met other epidemics of violence and despair before and found ways to respond. The answers were never perfect, never immediate. But change came because people refused to accept slaughter or inhumanity as ordinary.

We must summon that resolve again. It begins with truth-telling: continuously acknowledging that the tools of mass murder are too easily at hand and that common-sense safeguards save lives. It continues with courage: demanding that leaders act, not merely grieve. And it depends, finally, on solidarity: refusing to let these attacks define us, even as they wound us.

Another mass shooting is already being planned, already queued to erupt in some American town. That is the brutal reality. But despair is not destiny. America can do better than living in fear of the next headline.