These Fresno faith leaders are fighting gun culture and gun violence. ‘I can do something.’
They are playing the long game, and know it. Nothing will happen overnight. But a group of interfaith leaders from Fresno say they are in the game, addressing gun violence in ways they have not in the past.
For the Rev. Samuel Colley-Toothaker, dean at St. James Episcopal Cathedral, change came on an early-April Sunday.
“On April 3, when I was getting ready to come in to celebrate Mass on Sunday and I’d heard about the mass shooting in Sacramento, something inside of me said, ‘You know what, this is not going to get better unless you, Sam, do something about it,’” said Colley-Toothaker, who addressed gun violence on Sunday in an op-ed in The Bee. “And so I reached out to the interfaith community here and I said, ‘What are you willing to do?’ They said, ‘Whatever is necessary ... ”
They started to meet, and met again on Wednesday at the St. James Episcopal Cathedral along with Aaron Foster, program manager for Advance Peace Fresno, who has lost two children to gun violence.
“If we do nothing, if we choose to do nothing, if we all believe we can do nothing then we are complicit in allowing it to happen,” Colley-Toothaker said from the pulpit. “The issues related to gun violence are for sure complicated. There are no quick fixes. As someone who grew up in a family that owns guns, as someone who grew up around guns, I have no objection to owning guns.
“But I do have objections to owning weapons of war that are efficient and effective killers. If you’ve never seen what a bullet from an AR-15 will do to the human body, it is beyond words. It doesn’t pass through. It sprawls. It explodes. It tears a human body apart, and these guns are killing our children.”
I can’t do everything, Colley-Toothaker said, but “I can do something.”
There were letters to legislators for a full house at the cathedral to sign, and information about Advance Peace and its goal to build healthier, safer and more just communities and fight gun violence in urban neighborhoods. Featured speakers enlightened and challenged, from Colley-Toothaker and Foster, from Rev. Toni Alvarez, deacon at St. James Episcopal Cathedral; Reza Nekumanesh, executive director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno; Rev. and Bishop David C. Rice of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin.
From Nekumanesh, there was a call to action. “The last time I stood in this church to speak, it was again to denounce gun violence and that time was Christchurch in New Zealand,” he said.
‘We are killing this country. And, why?’
“We prayed, and I believe in prayer,” Nekumanesh said. “I believe in both the formative and the transformative nature of prayer. I believe in the power of prayer, but all of us know that prayer without actions is futile, my sisters and brothers. When we organize ourselves to act, let us not merely look at gun laws as an end all be all. So long as injustice, inequity, both poverty and the extreme gap between those who have and those who do not have, so long as these evils breathe, the cold breath of gun violence will always be a reality.”
And, from the start, a stark reality.
“You’ve heard something about numbers and I think we are inundated by numbers these days,” Rice said. “You’ve heard about the 21,000 who have died as a result of gun violence. You’ve heard 293 mass shootings in 184 days. Please do the math. There’s probably a mass shooting taking place right now … What we didn’t hear about, as you break down the statistics, of our children being killed: 0 through 11 years of age, 175 since January 1, 363 injured; Teens, 12 through 17, 648 dead, 1,684 injured.
“We are killing one another. We are killing this country. And, why?”
Colley-Toothaker reiterated, “I can’t do everything, but I can do something.”
“We now have a group of about 18 people who are part of a task group that is going to focus on various areas,” he said. “The idea isn’t to eliminate guns. We’re not going to do that. That’s not realistic. But we can encourage, demand, cajole, push our legislatures to enact sensible gun laws with reasonable background checks with special attention to those who are purchasing weapons and have a history of domestic violence or mental health issues. We can do that. We can encourage them, and vote them out if they refuse to do that.
“We can address the issue of gun manufacturers and their advertising. We can say to our legislators, you need to put restrictions on the type of advertising or eliminate advertising for these weapons altogether. We did it with tobacco, when we realized that tobacco was killing our nation. Why are we not doing it when these guns are killing our children? There are a lot of things that we can do. We can’t do everything, but we can do something. We can educate ourselves. We can lift our voices, and we can vote.”