Photo by Quentin Kemmel on Unsplash

I'm realizing that although I have at least two degrees of separation from any mass shooting, these school shootings and other mass shootings are still something of a trigger for me. It's at least in part related to the 2013 shooting deaths of Chris Keith and Isaac Miller. Chris Keith was a former member of my church. She and her son Isaac were killed in an act of domestic violence, by her estranged husband.

Like the killer in the recent school shooting, Chris's killer was a known threat. These are the things I know about her killer: He had been abusive of Chris for some time. Chris minimized the abuse when talking to me, saying it was the first time, when it wasn't, but she wasn't ready to leave. What I didn't know, but found out after her death was that authorities had been called all the way back in 2003, before I met her. In the news it was revealed that Chris had taken out a personal protection order against him at one time. Chris had said, "Threats of shooting me to death with one of his hunting rifles were par for the course," in her personal protection order (source). She also said he was diagnosed with depression, and in 2011 he "stayed in bed for nearly the entire year, only rarely getting up other than to use the bathroom... At least once a week, he told me if I ever left him he would kill me." And eventually Chris withdrew the personal protection order. And I also know that her killer had been previously reported to CPS for what I consider to be violence against a child, because my religious education coordinator and I reported it -- and Chris told me that CPS had followed up on it, but it was an incident that had been previously investigated by that point.

These are the things I heard second-hand, from friends of Chris: Her killer had numerous run-ins with the police around domestic violence, including a recent incident. In response, he checked himself voluntarily in to a psychiatric unit, and the police took his guns. Even though these were known things about him, he hadn't been convicted of domestic violence, and he hadn't been convicted of child abuse, and he hadn't been involuntarily committed for mental illness. So his guns were returned, because there were no laws that could keep them from him. So he took his biological children to visit his parents for the night, for an early Christmas celebration, and then he killed his wife and step-son -- and himself.

It's taken a while for people to fully understand this, but we now know that many of these mass shooting killers are also men who have committed domestic violence. There is a link there between these larger events and the domestic violence events that happen every day. Everytown for Gun Safety says that 54% of the mass shooters between 2009 and 2016 were known to have committed domestic violence in their past. That's the domestic violence we know about, which means the real rates may be higher.

Domestic violence is mass murder, too, although we don't really understand it that way. Nearly three people per day are killed in acts of domestic violence.

The keys to solving mass shootings are the same keys to solving domestic violence, both in the need for gun control, and in the need for greater background checks and the work of mental wellness.
But we're not solving domestic violence murders with background checks, because too often the domestic violence is unreported, or, like in Chris's case, the victim pulls a protective order or doesn't follow through on prosecution. We know this is the case, again and again, in domestic violence. So banning gun ownership of people who are convicted of domestic violence, while a good step, is not going to catch most of these people. It's only after the deaths that we hear the stories of repeated abuse. Chris's friends and family (and clergy) had some idea what she endured, and wanted to help her to get out, and she did separate from her abuser, but it wasn't enough to stop him from killing her.

The same is true for focusing on mental illness -- too many people are undiagnosed, and most people who are diagnosed will never commit a violent crime -- so it won't do the job of stopping these killers.
But if we stop domestic violence entirely -- look at and understand the roots of domestic violence, treat people at the root causes -- we might address a lot of these mass shooting incidents as well. This includes looking at how masculinity is constructed in our culture, and recognizing the ways that this construct of gender can turn toxic and violent. It includes a better understanding of mental illness and mental wellness. It includes working with children, so that we can break the cycle of abuse over generations. It includes teaching things like self-control, understanding triggers, empathy, and resilience. In short, we need to teach love, and not the fantasy love that leads to domestic violence, but a real agape love and an ethic of care.

And none of that may ever be enough. Violence happens in liberal religious communities, it happens in rich families and educated families and liberal families. And it will evade our attempts to address it over and over again. It lives and grows in secrecy and shadows. So this is not meant to be a substitute for gun reform. The ability to purchase weapons designed to kill and do so quickly increases the deaths in these situations. Our society should be able to stop access to these weapons like the AR-15, which are unnecessary for either sport or personal protection. And we need to make it so that a man like Chris Keith's killer won't be able to get those guns back, when we know as much as we know about him, and so that the recent killer, who was a clearly known threat, won't be able to walk into a store and legally purchase a gun, either. And when we do so, the body count in our mass killings will go down.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I had a dream -- that sort of dream where you're not really completely asleep, but you're not driving the dream with your conscious mind anymore.  I dreamed I swallowed a whistle.  I jerked myself back to full consciousness, and tried falling asleep again, and it happened again.  I swallowed a whistle.  For a few minutes I couldn't shake my brain from bringing this whistle image to me again and again.


How strange as a dream it seemed, but I knew right away what it meant.  I knew, with the first dreaming moment, this wasn't just any whistle that was getting stuck in my craw.  This was a rape whistle.  And it wasn't just any rape whistle.  It was the one given to me when I went to seminary.  That was part of the introduction to Chicago, as I remember it, at Meadville Lombard: Welcome to Chicago.  You're in an area that may be more dangerous than you're used to.  Don't walk alone at night.  Here's a rape whistle.

Dreaming of swallowing the rape whistle was a dream with an instantly clear message to me: we have to stop swallowing the idea as a society that the answer to violence against women is to tell women to protect themselves.

It's a message I've heard for decades, and a message that I've helped share, really, and incorporated into the way I lived my life.  I remember my roommate in at the University of Michigan telling me one night when I was going to be walking somewhere at night, "Put on your bitch face, and carry your keys."  She meant carry your keys like a weapon.  (Funny thing, this is now at least sometimes called "Wolverine keys" but because of the X-Men character, not because we Michigan Wolverines did it.)
And I did.  I put on my most confident, I-know-where-I'm-going-and-I'm-tough-don't-mess-with-me bitch face, and I carried my keys like Wolverine. 

And then, years later, I carried that rape whistle with me everywhere I went for years until it rusted off my key chain.  Think about what that means: it's not uncommon for women in this country to carry with them, at all times when not at home, a symbol of violence against women and their own vulnerability to such. 

During my college years there were annual "Take Back the Night" rallies.  I attended some.  But this way of dealing with violence against women was a fringe thing, a feminist thing. So while we yelled "Take Back the Night," we still walked home in groups.

In college at the University of Michigan I was part of a team called SafeWalk.  We volunteered our time for a few hours a week every week, and went to the library where were dispatched, in teams of two, to go anywhere within a mile or so of campus and walk people, mostly women, from wherever they were to wherever they were going. ( It's interesting to see that at some point the University officially incorporated the service into the U, and now they provide rides up to 3 am, which was later than we could go, because the library closed at 2, so we didn't have our dispatching station after that hour.)  The idea back then was that no person at U of M would have to walk alone at night if they weren't comfortable doing so.  It was a good service.  I'm glad I did it.

But it wasn't the solution. 

I'm not saying to just walk alone at night, to just forgo the escort and the whistle and the Wolverine keys.  I'm saying that for decades we've been telling women this was the normal way of life -- the world is violent, protect yourself.  And what we need to be saying is: We need to change the world.  This is not okay.

It's so good and bad all at once to hear everyone talking about the rape culture, about #yesallwomen, about violence and misogyny.  Good, of course, because our society is talking about it.  Bad, because this is still the way it is.  Bad because this year my congregation had a former member killed in an act of domestic violence, and so it's timely for us to be hearing about this in the culture, but we're also perhaps still grieving and raw to some degree, and so it's a hard time to be talking about it.

But maybe, just maybe, the time has finally come where we can, as a society, stop swallowing the rape whistle and start to really take back the night.

Our community lost a former member and her child in a traumatic and violent way.  What I want to share with our community right now is a little bit about how to recognize if you are experiencing trauma, and what some of the things you can do are.

First of all, you don't have to be close to someone who was killed in order to experience this as a traumatic event in your life.  There are a lot of forms that a trauma response can take.  Sometimes it leads to people questioning God or one's faith-- how can there be a God who lets these things happen?  Sometimes there is anger -- How could somebody do this?  Sometimes the dominant emotion is grief -- How could anybody do this?  Sometimes it's a feeling of guilt -- I should've done something more.  Sometimes we experience things bodily -- sleeplessness, lack of appetite or stress eating, exhaustion, stomach problems, stress dreams or nightmares, and more.  Some people will feel none of these at first, and they may hit later.  A list of things you might experience and some things to do is here, and for children here.  There are a wide range of responses that are "normal" in a situation like this.  People naturally search for meaning -- what could've gone differently, who is to blame.  That's also normal.  But it's not necessarily helpful -- trying to make sense out of senselessness is what keeps our minds going in circles and leads to some of those symptoms of sleeplessness, stress, and more.  Of course, some people deal with trauma by seeking information, and others by shutting details out.  Both are ways we protect ourselves in this time, so be aware that if you're in one style, others may not be.  If one thing you're looking for is information on domestic violence, there's more information here.

The next thing to know is that trauma has a cycle that a community will go through.  At first we will mostly pull together to get through things.  After that, however, there can be division.  Some people may think we're doing too much, and some people not enough.  A good chart for understanding this is here.  In the months to come, what will be most important is that we continue to give each other lots of space and assume goodwill.  And what we need to do personally is each keep a close tab on ourselves and loved ones and reach out for resources when we're having trouble coping. 

The bottom line right now is take care of yourselves.  If you need help, reach out.  And if you see someone else reaching out, give a hand and connect them back to some of the resources.

This week our congregation lost two people who were loved by us -- a mother and son who were former members who were killed in an act of domestic violence. 

Today at the end of an emotional and difficult day, I went to the hospital to visit a member who had been suddenly hospitalized.  (The member is doing okay, but still in some pain.)  I parked near the E.R. and walked in the E.R. doors to avoid being out in the cold, and then walked through the hallway to the main hospital lobby.

There in the hallway were pictures from The Real MEN's Project.  I've seen these pictures before.  Most of them are in the wonderful book, Real Dads, by Dani Meier, the founder, which I got for my husband for Father's Day the year it came out.  But it was different suddenly encountering them in a hallway, and not just because of the bigger size of the photos.  It was different because it was an encounter in a different way with these fathers in our community who have signed a pledge against domestic violence along with their children.  Each picture has the name of the photographer beside it, and at the bottom of the picture there's a pledge of nonviolence signed by the father photographed.  One of my favorites is this one by my friend Tom McMillen-Oakley.  They hang it upside-down, he says.  This is the right-side up view:  That's his daughter's feet in the photo, along with his own.


There are a few other names and faces I recognized once again as I walked around.  On the way back out of the hospital, I stopped again, and this time stopped and looked at each and every photograph, and the men and their children, at the names of the photographers, at those signed pledges over and over again.  And then I sat and just smiled, and cried a little.

What a wonderful, healing balm that walk was.  If you need a moment to cry tears of joy, take a walk to Allegiance Health and walk the long way in.   If you're not local, watch the video.  You don't get to see those signed pledges, but you see the images of these fathers and children:


 It was exactly what I needed to see today.  What a moment of grace that was to take the long way in.