When I announced our comprehensive anti-violence initiative last year I noted that ending the epidemic of violence would take many hands and minds, but that just because we could not do everything in the urgent time frame an epidemic requires, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something. It is irresponsible to just shrug and declare the problem insolvable.

Since then:

• I have visited places where we are addressing the root causes of violence - mentoring centers, school classrooms and Catholic Charities facilities
• I have joined thousands in walks for peace in neighborhoods where killings happen every week,
• I have blessed a caravan of young people headed to Washington DC to demand their right to life, and
• I have traveled to Springfield to beg for the commonsense gun control measures civilized nations around the world enjoy but for which we wait, largely in vain as some argue that we must do everything before we do something.

But nothing has inspired me so much to take up this call for action as the nights I spent praying and weeping with the families of gunshot victims. Their pain was palpable, their voices passionate and their cause contagious. 

So, while debates continue, balancing death and maiming against the inconvenience and cost for licensing gun dealers or even against the putative rights to own assault weapons, deadly ammunition and other items that do not belong anywhere except in the hands of military personnel trained to protect us, I come here today – to stand with those who are the real authorities on the epidemic of gun violence.

We are united in demanding that those we elect have the moral courage to take the steps they can to save lives – maybe not all the lives, maybe not every day, but ask those who grieve if their child, their brother, their mother was not worth the effort to try.

These emergency and trauma health care professionals and pastoral care associates are more than ready to discuss how we should weigh the price of lives lost, diminished by injury and haunted by grief and fear against the right to sell weapons in shops we are told are “too expensive” to license.

So, I call on the elected officials of Illinois, listen to them, they are the real experts on gun control, and act to see that SB 1657 becomes law.  We cannot make Indiana’s laws stronger, or Missouri’s laws stronger, or block the 60 percent of guns used in crimes that come from beyond our state’s borders, but we can have an impact on the 40 percent of these firearms purchased here. I say it again, just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something.

I greatly admire the health care and pastoral professionals who work in this real field hospital.  They are also victims. They suffer anguish, heartache and pain as society calls on them to heal body and spirit and do miraculous things. And yet the work with the full knowledge that all of this – the bloodshed, the grieving families, the lives forever altered – are completely, utterly preventable.