From Sandy Hook to Brown University: the Conservative Gun Lust Killing Our Children

by | Dec 15, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Photo by Moren Hsu, Unsplash

From Sandy Hook to Brown University: the Conservative Gun Lust Killing Our Children

by | Dec 15, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Photo by Moren Hsu, Unsplash

The children at Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde and Brown University, and hundreds of other schools in America, deserve better than to become faceless, nameless, storyless numbers added to our perpetual national failure.

Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

Every allegiance has a cost.

There is a price tag to irrational fidelity.

Passionate devotion to something always comes at the neglect of something else, or sometimes even its total disregard.

Exactly 13 years after the horrors of Sandy Hook Elementary, Conservative America’s abnormal adoration of guns continues to kill our children.

Seeing petrified Brown University students crammed into utility closets, reading frantic goodbye texts from sons and daughters to helpless parents, and hearing firsthand accounts of the scalding chaos visited upon young people in places where dreams are meant to be nurtured, not destroyed, a sickening feeling of deja vu comes.

We’ve seen this far too many times, and we know how it will unfold:

Classroom scenes of carnage and brutality befitting foreign war zones.

Performative social media grief from Republican politicians whose lapels are adorned with AR-15 pins, their empires built with the blood money of gunmakers.

Tone-deaf thoughts and prayers platitudes, copied and pasted from the most recent mass assassination, likely no more than a few weeks.

Crocodile-tear lamentations of feigned incredulity at the supposedly bewildering butchering of our children, the genesis of which is actually no mystery to anyone.

Showy, hollow Conservative Christian appeals to a Jesus they refuse to listen to and to a God whose children they have no regard for.

And beyond that… nothing.

Well, perhaps a few token red herrings of mental illness, woke ideology, or immigrant threats tossed into the news cycle as a distraction, depending on the details of the shooter—but beyond that, a repetition of empty mourning accompanied by complete inaction.

And in a few days, perhaps hours, the cycle will repeat itself: preventable death, useless words, and deadly partnerships by people whose fixation on guns borders on orgasmic.

America, we need to remind ourselves that this is not fucking normal… well, not anywhere but here, that is.

Because only here do we have a political party that is so inextricably entangled with those who feed, nurture, and profit from this routine slaughter of our sons and daughters that they will never have the moral courage to stop the bleeding, though they so easily could.

Only here do we have a Conservative Church that has supplanted Christ’s warnings not to live “eye for eye and tooth for tooth,” with a posturing, chest-beating God and Guns cowboy bravado.

Only here do we have a massive population whose fetishishtic lust over weapons of rapid carnage is so all-consuming that they are physically incapable of empathy and morally allergic to substantive change of any kind.

Friends, how many young people will be violently ripped from this life over the next 13 years if we do nothing?

How many desperate text messages will be sent from bloodied bathroom stalls?

How many premature funerals will distraught families plan instead of graduation parties?

How many insult-to-injury social media posts from politicians will grieving families be subjected to?

How many more deaths are we going to deem acceptable?

The children at Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde and Brown University, and hundreds of other schools in America, deserve better than to become faceless, nameless, storyless numbers added to our perpetual national failure.

The thousands upon thousands of young people who’ve had to carry the physical and emotional scars of unthinkable trauma merit our ferocity at the sickening stasis of the Republican Party.

The tens of millions of first graders, middle schoolers, and college freshmen in this country who absorb the terrifying videos, endure the active shooter drills, and imagine their last moments in the places they should feel the safest warrant courage from the adults charged with caring for and protecting them.

The unnatural gun lust of Conservative America has failed our children.

The rest of us whose hearts are breaking cannot be silent, or we will have failed them, too.

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.

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